THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


1  ^ 


L  ^f,      '   ri-ru^^^^   '""^'^ 


? 


/oi  ?«^  Al^i' 


J     ' 


THE   BOOK-BILLS   OF   NARCISSUS 


O  mes  lettres  d amour,  de  veriu,  de  jeunesse ; 

C'est  done  vous  !    Je  m'enivre  eticore  a  voire  ivresse  ; 

Je  vous  lis  d  genoux. 
Souffrez  que  pour  unjour  je  reprenne  voire  age  ! 
Laissez-moi  tite  cacher,  moi,  theureux  et  le  sage. 
Pour  pleurer  avec  vous  ! 

J^ avals  done  dix-huit  ans!  feiais  done  plcin  de  songes ! 
L'esperance  en  chantani  me  berfaii  de  viensonges. 

Un  astre  jii'avait  lui ! 
feiais  un  dieu  pour  ioi  gu'en  mon  ea'ur  seulje  nomnie ! 
fHais  done  eei  en/ani,  helas !  devani  qui  Phomtne 

Rougit  presque  aujourd  'hui ! 

Victor  Hugo — Les  Feuilles  d'Automne. 


THE    BOOK-BILLS 
OF    NARCISSUS 

AN    ACCOUNT    RENDERED    BY 

RICHARD  LE  GALLIENNE 

'  I  1 

WITH    A    FRONTISPIECE    BY 
ROBERT  FOWLER 


LONDON:     JOHN    LANE,    VIGO    ST. 
NEW  YORK:   G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 

1895 


Copyrighted  in  the  U?iited  States 
All  rights  reserved 


Edinburgh  :  T.  and  A.  Constable,  Printers  to  Her  Majesty 


TABLE     OF     CHAPTERS 

PAGE 

I.   INTRODUCTORY I 

II.   STILL    INTRODUCTORY,    BUT    THIS     TIME 

OF  A  GREATER  THAN  THE  WRITER             .  4 

III.  IN  WHICH   NARCISSUS  OPENS  HIS  'GLAD- 

STONE'         9 

IV.  ACCOUNTS  RENDERED          .           .           .           .  l8 

V.    AN    IDYLL    OF   ALICE    SUNSHINE,    WHICH 

REALLY  BELONGS  TO  THE  LAST  CHAPTER  44 

VI.   THE  SIBYLLINE  BOOKS          .           .           .           .  61 

VII.   THE  CHILDREN  OF  APOLLO          ...  87 

VIII.   GEORGE  MUNCASTER             .           .           .  105 

IX.   THAT  THIRTEENTH  MAID    .           .           .           .  I26 

X.    'in  VISHNU-LAND  WHAT  AVATAR?'  .            .  I55 


TO     MILDRED 

Always  thy  book,  too  late  acknowledged  thine, 

Now  when  thine  eyes  no  earthly  page  may  read 
Blinded  with  death,  or  blinded  with  the  shine 

Of  love's  own  lore  celestial.     Small  need, 
Forsooth,  for  thee  to  read  my  earthly  line, 

That  on  immortal  flowers  of  fancy  feed  ; 
What  should  my  angei  do  to  stoop  to  mine, 

Flowers  of  decay  of  no  immortal  seed. 

Yet,  love,  if  in  thy  lofty  dwelling-place, 
Higher  than  notes  of  any  soaring  bird. 
Beyond  the  beam  of  any  solar  light, 
A  song  of  earth  may  scale  the  awful  height. 
And  at  thy  heavenly  window  find  thy  face — 
I  know  my  voice  shall  never  fall  unheard. 


December  ttk,  1894. 


Note.  —  This  tliird  edition  has  been  revised,  atid 
Chapter  V.  is  entirely  new. 


CHAPTER   I 

INTRODUCTORY — A  WORD  OF  WISDOM, 
FOUND  WRITTEN,  LIKE  THE  MOST 
ANCIENT,    ON    LEATHER 

'  Ah  !  old  men's  boots  don't  go  there,  sir  ! ' 
said  the  bootmaker  to  me  one  day,  as  he 
pointed  to  the  toes  of  a  pair  I  had  just 
brought  him  for  mending.  It  was  a  signifi- 
cant observation,  I  thought ;  and  as  I  went  on 
my  way  home,  writing  another  such  chronicle 
with  every  springing  step,  it  filled  me  with 
much  reflection — largely  of  the  nature  of 
platitude,  I  have  little  doubt :  such  reflection, 
Reader,  as  is  even  already,  I  doubt  less, 
rippling  the  surface  of  your  mind  with  ever- 
widening  circles.  Yes  !  you  sigh  with  an  air, 
it  is  in  the  unconscious  autobiographies  we 
are  every  moment  writing — not  those  we 
publish  in  two  volumes  and  a  supplement 
A 


2  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

— where  the  truth  about  us  is  hid.  Truly  it 
is  a  thought  that  has  '  thrilled  dead  bosoms/ 
I  agree,  but  why  be  afraid  of  it  for  that, 
Reader?  Truth  is  not  become  a  platitude 
only  in  our  day.  *The  Preacher'  knew  it 
for  such  some  considerable  time  ago,  and  yet 
he  did  not  fear  to  'write  and  set  in  order 
many  proverbs.' 

You  have  kept  a  diary  for  how  many 
years  ?  Thirty  ?  dear  me  !  But  have  you 
kept  your  wine-bills  ?  If  you  ever  engage 
me  to  write  that  life,  which,  of  course,  must 
some  day  be  written — I  wouldn't  write  it 
myself — don't  trouble  about  your  diary. 
Lend  me  your  private  ledger.  '  There  the 
action  lies  in  his  true  nature.' 

Yet  I  should  hardly,  perhaps,  have  evoked 
this  particular  corollary  from  that  man  of 
leather's  observation,  if  I  had  not  chanced 
one  evening  to  come  across  those  old  book- 
bills  of  my  friend  Narcissus,  about  which  I 
have  undertaken  to  write  here,  and  been 
struck  —  well  -  nigh  awe  -  struck  —  by  the 
wonderful  manner  in  which  there  lay  re- 
vealed in  them  the  story  of  the  years  over 
which  they  ran.     To  a  stranger,  I  am  sure, 


OF    NARCISSUS  3 

they  would  be  full  of  meaning ;  but  to  me, 
who  lived  so  near  him  through  so  much  of 
the  time,  how  truly  pregnant  does  each 
briefest  entry  seem. 

To  Messrs.  Oldbuck  and  Sons  they,  alas ! 
often  came  to  be  but  so  many  accounts 
rendered  ;  to  you,  being  a  philosopher,  they 
would,  as  I  have  said,  mean  more ;  but  to 
me  they  mean  all  that  great  sunrise,  the 
youth  of  Narcissus. 

Many  modern  poets,  still  young  enough, 
are  fond  of  telling  us  where  their  youth  lies 
buried.  That  of  Narcissus — would  ye  know 
— rests  among  these  old  accounts.  Lo !  I 
would  perform  an  incantation.  I  throw 
these  old  leaves  into  the  elixir  vitce  of  sweet 
memory,  as  Dr.  Heidegger  that  old  rose 
into  his  wonderful  crystal  water.  Have  I 
power  to  make  Narcissus'  rose  to  bloom 
again,  so  that  you  may  know  something  of 
the  beauty  it  wore  for  us  ?  I  wonder.  I 
would  I  had.     I  must  try. 


THE    BOOK-BILLS 


CHAPTER    II 

STILL   INTRODUCTORY,   BUT    THIS   TIME 
OF  A  GREATER  THAN   THE    WRITER 

On  the  left-hand  side  of  Tithefields,  just  as 
one  turns  out  of  Prince  Street,  in  a  certain 
well-known  Lancashire  town,  is  the  unob- 
trusive bookshop  of  Mr.  Samuel  Dale.  It 
must,  however,  be  a  very  superficial  glance 
which  does  not  discover  in  it  something 
characteristic,  distinguishing  it  from  other 
'  second-hand '  shops  of  the  same  size  and 
style. 

There  are,  alas !  treatises  on  farriery  in 
the  window;  geographies,  chemistries,  and 
French  grammars,  on  the  trestles  outside  ; 
for  Samuel,  albeit  so  great  a  philosopher  as 
indeed  to  have  founded  quite  a  school,  must 
nevertheless  live.  Those  two  cigars  and 
that  '  noggin  '  of  whiskey,  which  he  purchases 
with  such  a  fine  solemnity  as  he  and  I  go 


OF    NARCISSUS  5 

home  together  for  occasional  symposia  in  his 
bachelor  lodging — those,  I  say,  come  not  with- 
out sale  of  such  treatises,  such  geographies, 
chemistries,  and  French  grammars. 

But  I  am  digressing.  There  is  a  distin- 
guishing air,  I  but  meant  to  say,  about  the 
little  shop.  Looking  closer,  one  generally 
finds  that  it  comes  of  a  choice  bit  of  old 
binding,  or  the  quaint  title-page  of  some 
tuneful  Elizabethan.  It  was  an  old  Crashaw 
that  first  drew  me  inside ;  and,  though  for 
some  reason  I  did  not  buy  it  then,  I  bought 
it  a  year  after,  because  to  it  I  owed  the 
friendship  of  Samuel  Dale. 

And  thus  for  three  bright  years  that  little 
shop  came  to  be,  for  a  daily  hour  or  so,  a 
blessed  palm-tree  away  from  the  burden  and 
heat  of  the  noon,  a  holy  place  whither  the 
money-changers  and  such  as  sold  doves 
might  never  come,  let  their  clamour  in  the 
outer  courts  ring  never  so  loud.  There  in 
Samuel's  talk  did  two  weary-hearted  bond- 
servants of  Egypt  draw  a  breath  of  the 
Infinite  into  their  lives  of  the  desk  ;  there 
could  they  sit  awhile  by  the  eternal  springs, 
and  feel  the  beating  of  the  central  heart. 


6  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

So  it  happened  one  afternoon,  about  five 
years  ago,  that  I  dropped  in  there  according 
to  wont.  But  Samuel  was  engaged  with 
some  one  in  that  dim  corner  at  the  far  end 
of  the  shop,  where  his  desk  and  arm-chair, 
tripod  of  that  new  philosophy,  stood  :  so  I 
turned  to  a  neighbouring  shelf  to  fill  the 
time.  At  first  I  did  not  notice  his  visitor ; 
but  as,  in  taking  down  this  book  and  that,  I 
had  come  nearer  to  the  talkers,  I  was  struck 
with  something  familiar  in  the  voice  of  the 
stranger.  It  came  upon  me  like  an  old 
song,  and  looking  up — why,  of  course,  it  was 
Narcissus  ! 

The  letter  N  does  not  make  one  of  the 
initials  on  the  Gladstone  bag  which  he  had 
with  him  on  that  occasion,  and  which,  filled 
with  books,  lay  open  on  the  floor  close  by  ; 
nor  does  it  appear  on  any  of  those  tobacco- 
pouches,  cigar-cases,  or  handkerchiefs  with 
which  men  beloved  of  fair  women  are  familiar. 
And  Narcissus  might,  moreover,  truthfully 
say  that  it  has  never  appeared  upon  any 
manner  of  stamped  paper  coming  under  a 
certain  notable  Act. 

To  be  less  indulgent  to  a  vice  from  which 


OF    NARCISSUS  7 

the  Reader  will,  I  fear,  have  too  frequent 
occasion  to  suffer  in  these  pages,  and  for 
which  he  may  have  a  stronger  term  than 
digression,  let  me  at  once  say  that  Narcissus 
is  but  the  name  Love  knew  him  by,  Love 
and  the  Reader ;  for  that  name  by  which  he 
was  known  to  the  postman — and  others — is 
no  necessity  here.  How  and  why  he  came 
to  be  so  named  will  appear  soon  enough. 

Yes !  it  was  the  same  old  Narcissus,  and 
he  was  wielding  just  the  same  old  magic,  I 
could  see,  as  in  our  class-rooms  and  play- 
grounds five  years  before.  What  is  it  in 
him  that  made  all  men  take  him  so  on  his 
own  terms,  made  his  talk  hold  one  so,  though 
it  so  often  stumbled  in  the  dark,  and  fell 
dumb  on  many  a  verbal  cul-de-sac}  What- 
ever it  is,  Samuel  felt  it,  and,  with  that  fine 
worshipful  spirit  of  his — an  attitude  which 
always  reminds  me  of  the  elders  listening  to 
the  boy  Jesus — was  doing  that  homage  for 
which  no  beauty  or  greatness  ever  appeals 
to  him  in  vain.  What  an  eye  for  soul  has 
Samuel !  How  inevitably  it  pierces  through 
all  husks  and  excrescences  to  the  central 
beauty!     In  that  short  talk  he  knew  Nar- 


8  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

cissus  through  and  through  ;  three  years  or 
thirty  years  could  add  but  Httle.  But  the 
talk  was  not  ended  yet ;  indeed,  it  seemed 
like  so  many  of  those  Tithefields  talks,  as  if 
in  the  'eternal  fitness  of  things'  it  never 
could,  would,  or  should  end.  It  was  I  at 
last  who  gave  it  pause,  and — yes  !  indeed,  it 
was  he.  We  had,  somehow,  not  met  for 
quite  three  years,  chums  as  we  had  been  at 
school.  He  had  left  there  for  an  office  some 
time  before  I  did,  and,  oddly  enough,  this 
was  our  first  meeting  since  then,  A  pur- 
chaser for  one  of  those  aforesaid  treatises 
on  farriery  just  then  coming  in,  dislodged 
us ;  so,  bidding  Samuel  good-bye — he  and 
Narcissus  already  arranging  for  '  a  night ' — 
we  obeyed  a  mutual  instinct,  and  presently 
found  ourselves  in  the  snuggery  of  a  quaint 
tavern,  which  was  often  to  figure  hereafter 
in  our  sentimental  history,  though  probably 
little  in  these  particular  chapters  of  it.  The 
things  '  seen  done  at  "  The  Mermaid  "  '  may 
some  day  be  written  in  another  place,  where 
the  Reader  will  know  from  the  beginning 
what  to  expect,  and  not  feel  that  he  has 
been  induced  to  buy  a  volume  under  false 
pretences. 


OF    NARCISSUS 


CHAPTER    III 

IN    WHICH    NARCISSUS    OPENS    HIS 
' GLADSTONE ' 

Though  it  was  so  long  since  we  had  met — 
is  not  three  years  indeed  'so  long'  in  youth? 
— we  had  hardly  to  wait  for  our  second  glass 
to  be  again  en  rapport.  Few  men  grow  so 
rapidly  as  Narcissus  did  in  those  young  days, 
but  fewer  still  can  look  back  on  old  enthu- 
siasms and  superannuated  ideals  with  a 
tenderness  so  delicately  considerate.  Most 
men  hasten  to  witness  their  present  altitude 
by  kicking  away  the  old  ladders  on  the  first 
opportunity  ;  like  vulgar  lovers,  they  seek  to 
flatter  to-day  at  the  expense  of  yesterday. 
But  Narcissus  was  of  another  fibre ;  he 
could  as  soon  have  insulted  the  memory  of 
his  first  love. 

So,  before  long,  we  had  passed  together 


lo  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

into  a  sweet  necropolis  of  dreams,  whither,  if 
the  Reader  care,  I  will  soon  take  him  by  the 
hand.  But  just  now  I  would  have  him 
concern  himself  with  the  afternoon  of  which 
I  write,  in  that  sad  tense,  the  past  present. 
Indeed,  we  did  not  ourselves  tarry  long 
among  the  shades,  for  we  were  young,  and 
youth  has  little  use  for  the  preterite ;  its 
verbs  are  wont  to  have  but  two  tenses.  We 
soon  came  up  to  the  surface  in  one,  with 
eyes  turned  instinctively  on  the  other. 

Narcissus'  bag  seemed,  somehow,  a  symbol ; 
and  I  had  caught  sight  of  a  binding  or  two 
as  it  lay  open  in  Tithefields  that  made  me 
curious  to  see  it  open  again.  He  was  only 
beginning  to  collect  when  we  had  parted  at 
school,  if  '  collect '  is  not  too  sacred  a  word  : 
beginning  to  buy  more  truly  expresses  that 
first  glutting  of  the  bookish  hunger,  which, 
like  the  natural  appetite,  never  passes  in 
some  beyond  the  primary  utilitarian  stage 
of '  eating  to  live/  otherwise  '  buying  to  read.' 
Three  years,  however,  works  miracles  of 
refinement  in  any  hunger  that  is  at  all 
capable  of  culture  ;  and  it  was  evident,  when 
Narcissus  did  open  his  '  Gladstone,'  that  it 


OF    NARCISSUS  ii 

had  taken  him  by  no  means  so  long  to 
attain  that  sublimation  of  taste  which  may 
be  expressed  as  'reading  to  buy.'  Each 
volume  had  that  air — of  breeding,  one  might 
almost  say — by  which  one  can  always  know 
a  genuine  bouquin  at  a  glance  ;  an  alluvial 
richness  of  bloom,  coming  upon  one  like  an 
aromatic  fragrance  in  so  many  old  things,  in 
old  lawns,  in  old  flowers,  old  wines,  and 
many  another  delicious  simile.  One  could 
not  but  feel  that  each  had  turned  its  golden 
brown,  just  as  an  apple  reddens — as,  indeed, 
it  had. 

I  do  not  propose  to  solemnly  enumerate 
and  laboriously  describe  these  good  things, 
because  I  hardly  think  they  would  serve  to 
distinguish  Narcissus,  except  in  respect  of 
luck,  from  other  bookmen  in  the  first  furor 
of  bookish  enthusiasm.  They  were  such 
volumes  as  Mr,  Pendennis  ran  up  accounts 
for  at  Oxford.  Narcissus  had  many  other 
points  in  common  with  that  gentleman. 
Such  volumes  as,  morning  after  morning, 
sadden  one's  breakfast-table  in  that  Tantalus 
menu,  the  catalogue.  Black  letter,  early 
printed,  first  editions  Elizabethan  and  Vic- 


12  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

torian,  every  poor  fly  anibered  in  large 
paper,  etc.  etc. ;  in  short,  he  ran  through  the 
gamut  of  that  craze  which  takes  its  turn  in 
due  time  with  marbles,  peg-tops,  beetles, 
and  foreign  stamps — with  probably  the  two 
exceptions  of  Bewick,  for  whom  he  could 
never  batter  up  an  enthusiasm,  and  '  facetiae.' 
These  latter  needed  too  much  camphor,  he 
used  to  say. 

His  two  most  cherished  possessions  were 
a  fine  copy  of  the  Stultiti<2  Laics,  printed  by 
Froben,  which  had  once  been  given  by 
William  Burton,  the  historian,  to  his  brother 
Robert,  when  the  latter  was  a  youngster  of 
twenty;  and  a  first  edition  of  one  of  Walton's 
lives,  *  a  presentation  copy  from  the  author.' 
The  former  was  rich  with  the  autographs 
and  marginalia  of  both  brothers,  and  on  the 
latter  a  friend  of  his  has  already  hung  a  tale, 
which  may  or  may  not  be  known  to  the 
Reader.  In  the  reverent  handling  of  these 
treasures,    two    questions    inevitably   forced 

themselves    upon    me :    where    the    d 1 

Narcissus,  an  apprentice,  with  an  allowance 
that  would  hardly  keep  most  of  us  in  tobacco, 
had  found  the  money  for  such  indulgences  ; 


OF    NARCISSUS  13 

and  how  he  could  find  in  his  heart  to  sell 
them  again  so  soon.  A  sorrowful  inter- 
jection, as  he  closed  his  bag,  explained  all : — 

*  Yes ! '  he  sighed,  '  they  have  cost  me 
thirty  pounds,  and  guess  how  much  I  have 
been  offered  for  them  ? ' 

I  suggested  ten. 

'  Five,'  groaned  my  poor  friend.  '  I  tried 
several  to  get  that.  "  H'm,"  says  each  one, 
indifferently  turning  the  most  precious  in  his 
hand,  "  this  would  hardly  be  any  use  to  me ; 
and  this  I  might  have  to  keep  months  before 
I  could  sell.  That  I  could  make  you  an 
offer  for  ;  what  have  you  thought  of  for  it  ?  " 
With  a  great  tugging  at  your  heart,  and 
well-nigh  in  tears,  you  name  the  absurdest 
minimum.  You  had  given  five  ;  you  halve 
it— surely  you  can  get  that !  But  "  O  no  !  I 
can  give  nothing  like  that  figure.  In  that 
case  it  is  no  use  to  talk  of  it."  In  despair 
you  cry,  "  Well,  what  will  you  offer  ?  "  with 
a  choking  voice.  "Fifteen  shillings  would 
be  about  my  figure  for  it,"  answers  the  fiend, 
relentless  as  a  machine — and  so  on.' 

'  I  tried  pawning  them  at  first,'  he  con- 
tinued, *  because  there  was  hope  of  getting 


14  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

them  back  some  time  that  way  ;  but,  trudging 
from  shop  to  shop,  with  many  prayers,  "a 
sovereign  for  the  lot"  was  all  I  could  get. 
Worse  than  dress-clothes ! '  concluded  the 
frank  creature. 

For  Narcissus  to  be  in  debt  was  nothing 
new :  he  had  always  been  so  at  school,  and 
probably  always  will  be.  Had  you  re- 
proached him  with  it  in  those  young  self- 
conscious  days  of  glorious  absurdity,  he 
would  probably  have  retorted,  with  a  toss  of 
his  vain  young  head  : — 

*  Well,  and  so  was  Shelley  ! ' 

I  ventured  to  enquire  the  present  difficulty 
that  compelled  him  to  make  sacrifice  of 
things  so  dear. 

*  Why,  to  pay  for  them,  of  course,'  was  the 
answer. 

And  so  I  first  became  initiated  into  the 
mad  method  by  which  Narcissus  had  such  a 
library  about  him  at  twenty-one.  From  some 
unexplained  reason,  largely,  I  have  little 
doubt,  on  account  of  the  charm  of  his  manners, 
he  had  the  easy  credit  of  those  respectable 
booksellers  to  whom  reference  has  been 
made  above.     No  extravagance  seemed  to 


OF   NARCISSUS  15 

shake  their  confidence.  I  remember  caHing 
upon  them  with  him  one  day  some  months 
following  that  afternoon — for  the  madness, 
as  usual,  would  have  its  time,  and  no  suffer- 
ings seemed  to  teach  him  prudence — and  he 
took  me  up  to  a  certain  'fine  set'  that  he 
had  actually  resisted,  he  said,  for  a  fortnight. 
Alas !  I  knew  what  that  meant.  Yes,  he 
must  have  it  ;  it  was  just  the  thing  to  help 
him  with  a  something  he  was  writing — '  not 
to  read,  you  know,  but  to  make  an  atmo- 
sphere,' etc.  So  he  used  to  talk ;  and  the 
odd  thing  was,  that  we  always  took  the 
wildness  seriously  ;  he  seemed  to  make  us 
see  just  what  he  wanted.  '  I  say,  John,'  was 
the  next  I  heard,  at  the  other  end  of  the 
shop,  'will  you  kindly  send  me  round  that  set 
of  so-and-so,  'and  charge  it  to  my  account?' 
'John,'  the  son  of  old  Oldbuck,  and  for  a 
short  time  a  sort  of  friend  of  Narcissus, 
would  answer,  'Certainly,'  with  a  voice  of 
the  most  cheerful  trust ;  and  yet,  when  we 
had  gone,  it  was  indeed  no  less  a  sum  than 
£10,  los.  which  he  added  to  the  left-hand 
side  of  Mr.  N.'s  account. 

Do  not  mistake  this  for  a  certain  vulgar 


i6  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

quality,  with  a  vulgar  little  name  of  five 
letters.  No  one  could  have  less  of  that  than 
Narcissus.  He  was  often,  on  the  contrary, 
quite  painfully  diffident.  No,  it  was  not 
'  cheek,'  Reader ;  it  was  a  kind  of  irrational 
innocence.  I  don't  think  it  ever  occurred  to 
him,  till  the  bills  came  in  at  the  half-years, 
what  '  charge  it  to  my  account '  really  meant. 
Perhaps  it  was  because,  poor  lad,  he  had  so 
small  a  practical  acquaintance  with  it,  that 
he  knew  so  little  the  value  of  money.  But 
how  he  suffered  when  those  accounts  did 
come  in  !  Of  course,  there  was  nothing  to 
be  done  but  to  apply  to  some  long-suffering 
friend ;  denials  of  lunch  and  threadbare  coats 
but  nibbled  at  the  amount — especially  as  a 
fast  to-day  often  found  revulsion  in  a  festival 
to-morrow.  To  save  was  not  in  Narcissus. 
I  promised  to  digress.  Reader,  and  I  have 
kept  my  word.  Now  to  return  to  that 
afternoon  again.  It  so  chanced  that  on  that 
day  in  the  year  I  happened  to  have  in  my 
pocket — what  you  might  meet  me  every  day 
in  five  years  without  finding  there — a  ten- 
pound  note.  It  was  for  this  I  felt  after  we 
had    been    musing   awhile — Narcissus,    pro- 


OF    NARCISSUS  17 

bably,  on  everything  else  in  the  world  except 
his  debts — and  it  was  with  this  I  awoke  him 
from  his  reverie.  He  looked  at  his  hand, 
and  then  at  me,  in  bewilderment.  Poor 
fellow,  how  he  wanted  to  keep  it,  yet  how  he 
tried  to  look  as  if  he  couldn't  think  of 
doing  so.  He  couldn't  help  his  joy  shining 
through. 

'But  I  want  you  to  take  it,'  I  said;  'believe 
me,  I  have  no  immediate  need  of  it,  and  you 
can  pay  me  at  your  leisure.'  Ten  pounds 
towards  the  keep  of  a  poet  once  in  a  life- 
time is,  after  all,  but  little  interest  on  the 
gold  he  brings  us.  At  last  I  'prevailed,' 
shall  I  say  ?  but  on  no  account  without  the 
solemnity  of  an  I  O  U  and  a  fixed  date 
for  repayment,  on  which  matter  poor  N. 
was  always  extremely  emphatic.  Alas  !  Mr. 
George  Meredith  has  already  told  us  how 
this  passionate  anxiety  to  be  bound  by  the 
heaven  above,  the  earth,  and  the  waters 
under  the  earth,  is  the  most  fatal  symptom 
by  which  to  know  the  confirmed  in  this 
kind.  Captain  Costigan  had  it,  it  may  be 
remembered  ;  and  the  same  solicitude,  the 
same  tearful  gratitude,  I  know,  accom- 
B 


i8  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

panied  every  such  transaction  of  my  poor 
Narcissus. 

Whether  it  was  as  apparent  on  the  due 
date,  or  whether  of  that  ten  pounds  I  have 
ever  looked  upon  the  Hke  again,  is  surely  no 
affair  of  the  Reader's  ;  but,  lest  he  should  do 
my  friend  an  injustice,  I  had  better  say — I 
haven't. 


OF    NARCISSUS  19 


CHAPTER    IV 

ACCOUNTS    RENDERED 

Nothing  strikes  one  more  in  looking  back, 
either  on  our  own  lives  or  on  those  of  others, 
than  how  little  we  assimilate  from  the  greatest 
experiences  ;  in  nothing  is  Nature's  apparent 
wastefulness  of  means  more  ironically  im- 
pressive. A  great  love  comes  and  sets  one's 
whole  being  singing  like  a  harp,  fills  high 
heaven  with  rainbows,  and  makes  our  dingy 
alleys  for  awhile  bright  as  the  streets  of  the 
New  Jerusalem  ;  and  yet,  if  five  years  after 
we  seek  for  what  its  incandescence  has  left 
us,  we  find,  maybe,  a  newly  helpful  epithet, 
maybe  a  fancy,  at  most  a  sonnet.  Nothing 
strikes  one  more,  unless,  perhaps,  the  obverse, 
when  we  see  some  trifling  pebble-cast  ripple 
into  eternity,  some  fateful  second  prolific  as 
the  fly  aphis.  And  so  I  find  it  all  again 
exampled  in  these  old  accounts.     The  books 


20  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

that  mean  most  for  Narcissus  to-day  could 
be  carried  in  the  hand  without  a  strap,  and 
could  probably  be  bought  for  a  sovereign. 
The  rest  have  survived  as  a  quaint  cadence 
in  his  style,  have  left  clinging  about  his 
thought  a  delicate  incense  of  mysticism,  or 
are  bound  up  in  the  retrospective  tenderness 
of  boyish  loves  long  since  gone  to  dream. 

Another  observation  in  the  same  line  of 
reflection  also  must  often  strike  one : — for 
what  very  different  qualities  than  those  for 
which  we  were  first  passionate  do  we  come 
afterwards  to  value  our  old  enthusiasms.  In 
the  day  of  their  bloom  it  was  the  thing  itself, 
the  craze,  the  study,  for  its  own  sake ;  now 
it  is  the  discipline,  or  any  broad  human 
culture,  in  which  they  may  have  been 
influential.  The  boy  chases  the  butterfly, 
and  thinks  not  of  the  wood  and  the  blue 
heaven ;  but  those  only  does  the  man 
remember,  for  the  mark  of  their  beauty 
upon  him,  so  unconsciously  impressed,  for 
the  health  of  their  power  and  sweetness 
still  living  in  his  blood — for  these  does  that 
chase  seem  alone  of  worth,  when  the  dusty 
entomological    relic    thereof    is    in    limbo. 


OF    NARCISSUS  21 

And  so  that  long  and  costly  shelf,  groaning 
beneath  the  weight  of  Grose  and  Dugdale, 
and  many  a  mighty  slab  of  topographical 
prose  ;  those  pilgrimages  to  remote  parish 
churches,  with  all  their  attendant  ardours  of 
careful  '  rubbings ' ;  those  notebooks,  filled 
with  patient  data ;  those  long  letters  to 
brother  antiquaries — of  sixteen  ;  even  that 
famous  Exshire  Tour  itself,  which  was  to 
have  rivalled  Pennant's  own — what  remains 
to  show  where  this  old  passion  stood,  with 
all  the  clustering  foliage  of  a  dream  ;  what 
but  that  quaint  cadence  I  spoke  of,  and  an 
anecdote  or  two  which  seemed  but  of  little 
import  then,  with  such  breathless  business 
afoot  as  an  old  font  or  a  Roman  road  ? 

One  particular  Roman  road,  I  know,  is 
but  remembered  now,  because,  in  the  rich 
twilight  of  an  old  June  evening,  it  led  up 
the  gorsy  stretches  of  Lancashire  'Heights' 
to  a  solemn  plateau,  wide  and  solitary  as 
Salisbury  Plain,  from  the  dark  border  of 
which,  a  warm  human  note  against  the 
lonely  infinite  of  heath  and  sky,  beamed 
the  little  whitewashed  '  Traveller's  Rest,'  its 
yellow  light,  growing  stronger  as  the  dusk 


22  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

deepened,  meeting  the  eye  withasense  of  com- 
panionship becoming  a  vague  need  just  then. 
The  seeming  spiritual  significance  of  such 
forlorn  wastes  of  no-man's  land  had,  I  know, 
a  specially  strong  appeal  for  Narcissus,  and, 
in  some  moods,  the  challenge  which  they 
seem  to  call  from  some  'dark  tower'  of 
spiritual  adventure  would  have  led  him 
wandering  there  till  star-light ;  but  a  day  of 
rambling  alone,  in  a  strange  country,  among 
unknown  faces,  brings  a  social  hunger  by 
evening,  and  a  craving  for  some  one  to 
speak  to  and  a  voice  in  return  becomes 
almost  a  fear.  A  bright  kitchen-parlour, 
warm  with  the  health  of  six  workmen, 
grouped  round  a  game  of  dominoes,  and  one 
huge  quart  pot  of  ale,  used  among  them  as 
woman  in  the  early  world,  was  a  grateful 
inglenook,  indeed,  wherein  to  close  the  day. 
Of  course,  friend  N.  joined  them,  and  took 
his  pull  and  paid  his  round,  like  a  Walt 
Whitman.  I  like  to  think  of  his  slight 
figure  amongst  them  ;  his  delicate,  almost 
girl-like,  profile  against  theirs  ;  his  dreamy 
eyes  and  pale  brow,  surmounted  by  one  of 
those   dark   clusters   of  hair   in    which   the 


OF    NARCISSUS  23 

fingers  of  women  love  to  creep — an  incon- 
gruity, though  of  surfaces  only,  which  certain 
who  knew  him  but  '  by  sight,'  as  the  phrase 
is,  might  be  at  a  loss  to  understand.  That 
was  one  of  the  surprises  of  his  constitution. 
Nature  had  given  him  the  dainty  and 
dreamy  form  of  the  artist,  to  which  habit 
had  added  a  bookish  touch,  ending  in  a  tout 
ensemble  of  gentleness  and  distinction  with 
little  apparent  affinity  to  a  scene  like  that 
in  the  'Traveller's  Rest'  But  there  are 
many  whom  a  suspicion  of  the  dilettante  in 
such  an  exterior  belies,  and  Narcissus  was 
one  of  them.  He  had  very  strongly  developed 
that  instinct  of  manner  to  which  sympathy 
is  a  daily  courtesy,  and  he  thus  readily, 
when  it  suited  him,  could  take  the  complexion 
of  his  company,  and  his  capacity  of  '  bend ' 
was  well-nigh  genius.  Of  course,  all  this  is 
but  to  say  that  he  was  a  gentleman  ;  yet  is 
not  that  in  itself  a  fine  kind  of  originality  ? 
Besides,  he  had  a  genuine  appetite  for  the 
things  of  earth,  such  as  many  another 
delicate  thing — a  damask  rose-bush,  for 
example — must  be  convicted  of  too ;  and 
often,  when  some  one  has  asked  him  '  what 


24  THE    BOOK -BILLS 

he  could  have  in  common  with  so-and-so,' 
I  have  heard  him  answer :  '  Tobacco  and 
beer.'  Samuel  Dale  once  described  him  as 
Shelley  with  a  chin  ;  and  perhaps  the  chin 
accounted  for  the  absence  of  any  of  those 
sentimental  scruples  with  regard  to  beef- 
steaks and  certain  varieties  of  jokes,  for 
which  the  saint-like  deserter  of  Harriet 
Westbrook  was  distinguished. 

A  supremely  quaint  instance  of  this  gift 
of  accommodation  befell  during  that  same 
holiday,  which  should  not  pass  unrecorded, 
but  which  I  offer  to  the  Reader  with  an 
emphatic  Honi  soil  qui  mal  y  pense.  De- 
spairing of  reaching  a  certain  large  manufac- 
turing town  on  foot  in  time  to  put  up  there, 
one  evening,  he  was  doing  the  last  mile  or 
two  by  rail,  and,  as  the  train  slackened  speed 
he  turned  to  his  companions  in  the  carriage 
to  enquire  if  they  could  tell  him  of  a  good 
hotel.  He  had  but  carelessly  noticed  them 
before  :  an  old  man,  a  slight  young  woman 
of  perhaps  thirty,  and  a  girl  about  fifteen  ; 
working  people,  evidently,  but  marked  by 
that  air  of  cleanly  poverty  which  in  some 
seems  but  a  touch  of  ascetic  refinement.   The 


OF    NARCISSUS  25 

young  woman  at  once  mentioned  The  Bull, 
and  thereupon  a  little  embarrassed  consulta- 
tion in  undertone  seemed  to  pass  between 
her  and  the  old  man,  resulting  in  a  timid 
question  as  to  whether  Narcissus  would  mind 
putting  up  with  them,  as  they  were  poor 
folk,  and  could  well  do  with  any  little  he 
cared  to  offer  for  his  accommodation.  There 
was  something  of  a  sad  winningness  in  the 
woman  which  had  predisposed  him  to  the 
group,  and  without  hesitation  he  at  once 
accepted,  and  soon  was  walking  with  them 
to  their  home,  through  streets  echoing  with 
Lancashire  'clogs.'  On  the  way  he  learnt 
the  circumstances  of  his  companions.  The 
young  woman  was  a  widow,  and  the  girl  her 
daughter.  Both  worked  through  the  day  at 
one  of  the  great  cotton  mills,  while  the  old 
man,  father  and  grandfather,  stayed  at  home 
and  '  fended '  for  them.  Thus  they  managed 
to  live  in  a  comfort  which,  though  straitened, 
did  not  deny  them  such  an  occasional  holi- 
day as  to-day  had  been,  or  the  old  man  the 
comfort  of  tobacco.  The  home  was  very 
small,  but  clean  and  sweet ;  and  it  was  not 
long  before  they  were  all  sat  down  together 


26  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

over  a  tea  of  wholesome  bread  and  butter 
and  eggs,  in  the  preparation  of  which  it 
seemed  odd  to  see  the  old  man  taking  his 
share.  That  over,  he  and  Narcissus  sat  to 
smoke  and  talk  of  the  neighbouring  country- 
side ;  N.  on  the  look-out  for  folk-lore,  and 
especially  for  any  signs  in  his  companion  of 
a  lingering  loyalty  of  belief  in  the  traditions 
thereabout,  a  loyalty  which  had  something  in 
it  of  a  sacred  duty  to  him  in  those  days. 
Those  were  the  days  when  he  still  turned  to 
the  east  a-Sundays,  and  went  out  in  the 
early  morning,  with  Herrick  under  his  arm, 
to  gather  May-dew,  with  a  great  uplifting  of 
the  spirit,  in  what  indeed  was  a  very  real  act 
of  worship. 

But  to  my  story !  As  bedtime  approached 
Narcissus  could  not  but  be  aware  of  a  grow- 
ing uneasiness  in  the  manner  of  the  young 
woman.  At  last  it  was  explained.  With 
blushing  effort  she  stammered  out  the 
question  :  Would  he  object  to  share  his  bed 
with — the  old  man  ?  '  Of  course  not,'  an- 
swered N.  at  once,  as  though  he  had  all  the 
time  intended  doing  that  very  thing,  and 
indeed,  thought  it  the  most  delightful 
arrangement  in  the  world. 


OF    NARCISSUS  27 

So  up  to  bed  go  the  oddly  consorted  pair. 
But  the  delicious  climax  was  yet  to  come. 
On  entering  the  room,  Narcissus  found  that 
there  were  two  beds  there  !  Why  should  we 
leave  that  other  bed  empty  ? — he  had  almost 
asked  ;  but  a  laughing  wonder  shot  through 
him,  and  he  stopped  in  time. 

The  old  man  was  soon  among  the  blankets, 
but  Narcissus  dallied  over  undressing,  look- 
ing at  this  and  that  country  quaintness  on 
the  wall ;  and  then,  while  he  was  in  a  state 
of  half  man  and  half  trousers,  the  voice  of 
the  woman  called  from  the  foot  of  the  stairs  : 
Were  they  in  bed  yet  ?  *  Surely,  it  cannot 
be !  it  is  too  irresistibly  simple,'  was  his 
thought ;  but  he  had  immediately  answered, 
'  In  a  moment,'  as  if  such  a  question  was 
quite  a  matter  of  course. 

In  that  space  he  had  blown  the  candle  out, 
and  was  by  the  old  man's  side :  and  then, 
in  the  darkness,  he  heard  the  two  women 
ascending  the  stairs.  Just  outside  his  door, 
which  he  had  left  ajar,  they  seemed  to  turn  off 
into  a  small  adjoining  room,  from  whence 
came  immediately  the  soft  delicious  sounds  of 
female  disrobing.      They  were  but  factory 


28  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

women,  yet  Narcissus  thought  of  Saint  Agnes 
and  Madeline,  we  may  be  sure.     And  then,  at 
last — indeed,  there  was  to  be  no  mistake  about 
it — the  door  was  softly  pushed  open,  and  two 
dim  forms  whispered  across  to  the  adjoining 
bed,   and,  after  a  little   preliminary  rustle, 
settled  down  to  a  rather  fluttered  breathing-. 
No  one  had  spoken :  not  even  a  Good- 
night;    but  Narcissus  could   hardly  refrain 
from  ringing  out  a  great  mirthful  cry,  while 
his  heart  beat  strangely,  and  the  darknesr 
seemed  to  ripple,  like  sunlight  in  a  cup,  with 
suppressed   laughter.     The   thought   of  the 
little  innocent  deception  as  to  their  sleeping- 
room,  which  poverty  had  caused   them  to 
practise,   probably   held   the   breath  of  the 
women,  while  the  shyness  of  sex  was  a  com- 
mon bond  of  silence — at  least,onthe  part  of  the 
three  younger.     It  was  long  before  Narcissus 
was  able  to  fall  asleep,  for  he  kept  picturing 
the  elder  woman  with  burning  cheek  and 
open  eyes  in  a  kind  of  'listening  fear'  be- 
neath the  coverlet ;  and  the  oddity  of  the 
thing  was  so  original,  so  like  some  conte  of  a 
Decameron  or  Heptameron,  with  the  wicked- 
ness  left   out.       But   at   last   wonder   gave 


OF    NARCISSUS  29 

place  to  weariness,  and  sleep  began  to  make 
a  still  odder  magic  of  the  situation.  The 
difficulty  of  meeting  at  breakfast  next 
morning,  which  had  at  once  suggested  itself 
to  N.'s  mind,  proved  a  vain  fear ;  for,  when 
he  arose,  that  other  bed  was  as  smooth  as 
though  it  had  Iain  untouched  through  the 
night,  and  the  daughters  of  labour  had  been 
gone  two  hours.  But  it  was  not  quite  with- 
out sign  that  they  had  gone,  for  Narcissus 
had  a  dreamlike  impression  of  opening  his 
eyes  in  the  early  light  to  find  a  sweet  woman's 
face  leaning  over  him  ;  and  I  am  sure  he 
wanted  to  believe  that  it  had  bent  down 
still  further,  till  it  had  kissed  his  lips — '  for 
his  mother's  sake,'  she  had  said  in  her  heart, 
as  she  slipped  away  and  was  seen  no  more. 

'If  this  were  fiction,  instead  of  a  veracious 
study  from  life,'  to  make  use  of  a  phrase 
which  one  rarely  finds  out  of  a  novel,  it  would 
be  unfitting  to  let  such  an  incident  as  that 
just  related  fall  to  the  ground,  except  as  the 
seed  of  future  development ;  but,  this  being 
as  I  have  stated,  there  is  nothing  more  to  say 
of  that  winning  ouvriere.  Narcissus  saw  her 
no  more. 


30  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

But  surely,  of  all  men,  he  could  best  afford 
that  one  such  pleasant  chance  should  put 
forth  no  other  blossom  save  that  half- 
dreamed  kiss  ; — and  how  can  one  ever  fore- 
see but  that  our  so  cherishable  spray  of 
bloom  may  in  time  add  but  another  branch 
to  that  orchard  of  Dead  Sea  fruit  which 
grows  inevitably  about  all  men's  dwellings  ? 

I  do  not  suppose  that  Narcissus  was 
really  as  exceptional  in  the  number  and 
character  of  his  numerous  boyish  loves  as 
we  always  regarded  him  as  being.  It  is  no 
uncommon  matter,  of  course  and  alas  !  for  a 
youth  between  the  ages  of  seventeen  and 
nineteen  to  play  the  juggler  at  keeping  three, 
or  even  half-a-dozen,  female  correspondents 
going  at  once,  each  of  whom  sleeps  nightly 
with  copious  documentary  evidence  of  her 
sole  and  incontrovertible  possession  of  the 
sacred  heart.  Nor  has  Narcissus  been  the 
only  lover,  I  suspect,  who,  in  the  season  of 
the  waning  of  the  moon,  has  sent  such 
excuses  for  scrappy  epistolary  make-shifts  as 
'  the  strident  din  of  an  office,  an  air  so  cruelly 
unsympathetic,  as  frost  to  buds,  to  the 
blossoming  of  all  those  words  of  love  that 


OF    NARCISSUS  31 

press  for  birth,'  when,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  he 
has  been  unblushingly  eating  the  lotus,  in 
the  laziest  chair  at  home,  in  the  quietest 
night  of  summer.  Such  insincerity  is  a 
common  besetting  sin  of  the  young  male  ; 
invariably,  I  almost  think,  if  he  has  the 
artistic  temperament.  Yet  I  do  not  think 
it  presents  itself  to  his  mind  in  its  nudity, 
but  comes  clothed  with  that  sophistry  in 
which  youth,  the  most  thoroughgoing  of 
philosophes,  is  so  ingenious.  Consideration 
for  the  beloved  object,  it  is  called — yes ! 
beloved  indeed,  though,  such  is  the  paradox 
in  the  order  of  things,  but  one  of  the 
several  vestals  of  the  sacred  fire.  One  can- 
not help  occasional  disinclination  on  a  lazy 
evening,  confound  it !  but  it  makes  one 
twinge  to  think  of  paining  her  with  such 
a  confession  ;  and  a  story  of  that  sort — 
well,  it 's  a  lie,  of  course  ;  but  it 's  one  with- 
out any  harm,  any  seed  of  potential  ill,  in 
it.  So  the  letter  goes,  maybe  to  take  its 
place  as  the  150th  of  the  sacred  writings, 
and  make  poor  Daffodilia,  who  has  loved 
to  count  the  growing  score,  happy  with  the 
completion  of  the  half-century. 


32  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

But  the  disinclination  goes  not,  though 
the  poor  passion  has,  of  course,  its  occasional 
leapings  in  the  socket,  and  the  pain  has  to 
come  at  last,  for  all  that  dainty  considera- 
tion, which,  moreover,  has  been  all  the  time 
feeding  larger  capacities  for  suffering.  For, 
of  course,  no  man  thinks  of  marrying  his 
twelfth  love,  though  in  the  thirteenth  there 
is  usually  danger  ;  and  he  who  has  jilted, 
so  to  say,  an  earl's  daughter  as  his  sixth, 
may  come  to  see 

'  The  God  of  Love,  ah  !  benedicite, 
How  mighty  and  how  great  a  lord  is  he ' 

in  the  thirteenth  Miss  Simpkins. 

But  this  is  to  write  as  an  outsider :  for 
that  thirteenth,  by  a  mystical  process  which 
has  given  to  each  of  its  series  in  its  day  the 
same  primal  quality,  is,  of  course,  not  only 
the  last,  but  the  first.  And,  indeed,  with 
little  casuistry,  that  thirteenth  may  be  truly 
held  to  be  the  first,  for  it  is  a  fact  deter- 
mined not  so  much  by  the  chosen  maid 
as  by  him  who  chooses,  though  he  himself 
is  persuaded  quite  otherwise.  To  him  his 
amorous   career  has   been   hitherto   an   un- 


OF    NARCISSUS  33 

successful  pursuit,  because  each  followed 
fair  in  turn,  when  at  length  he  has  caught 
her  flying  skirts,  and  looked  into  her  face, 
has  proved  not  that  '  ideal ' — 

'  That  not  impossible  she 
That  shall  command  my  heart  and  me ' — 

but  another,  to  be  shaken  free  again  in  dis- 
appointment. In  truth,  however,  the  lack 
has  been  in  himself  all  this  time.  He  had 
yet  to  learn  what  loving  indeed  meant :  and 
he  loves  the  thirteenth,  not  because  she  is 
pre-eminent  beyond  the  rest,  but  because 
she  has  come  to  him  at  the  moment  when 
that  'lore  of  loving'  has  been  revealed. 
Had  any  of  those  earlier  maidens  fallen 
on  the  happy  conjunction,  they  would, 
doubtless,  have  proved  no  less  loveworthy, 
and  seemed  no  less  that  '  ideal '  which  they 
have  since  become,  one  may  be  sure,  for  some 
other  illuminated  soul. 

Of  course,  some  find  that  love  early — the 
baby-love,  whom  one  never  marries,  and  then 
the  faithful  service.  Probably  it  happens 
so  with  the  majority  of  men  ;  for  it  is,  I 
think,  especially  to  the  artist  nature  that 
C 


34  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

it  comes  thus  late.  Living  so  vividly  within 
the  circle  of  its  own  experience,  by  its  very 
constitution  so  necessarily  egoistic,  the  latter, 
more  particularly  in  its  early  years,  is  always 
a  Narcissus,  caring  for  nought  or  none  ex- 
cept in  so  much  as  they  reflect  back  its  own 
beauty  or  its  own  dreams.  The  face  such 
a  youth  looks  for,  as  he  turns  the  coy  cap- 
tured head  to  meet  his  glance,  is,  quite 
unconsciously,  his  own,  and  the  '  ideal '  he 
seeks  is  but  the  perfect  mirror.  Yet  it  is 
not  that  mirror  he  marries  after  all :  for 
when  at  last  he  has  come  to  know  what 
that  word — one  so  distasteful,  so  '  soiled ' 
to  his  ear  '  with  all  ignoble '  domesticity 
— what  that  word  '  wife '  really  expresses, 
4ie  has  learnt,  too,  to  discredit  those  cynical 
guides  of  his  youth  who  love  so  well  to  write 
Ego  as  the  last  word  of  human  nature. 

But  the  particular  Narcissus  of  whom  I 
write  was  a  long  way  off  that  thirteenth 
maid  in  the  days  of  his  antiquarian  rambles 
and  his  Pagan-Catholic  ardours,  and  the 
above  digression  is  at  least  out  of  date. 

A  copy  of  Keats  which  I  have  by  me  as 
I  write  is  a  memorial  of  one  of  the  pretty 


OF    NARCISSUS  35 

loves  typical  of  that  period.  It  is  marked 
all  through  in  black  lead — not  so  gracefully 
as  one  would  have  expected  from  the  *  taper 
fingers'  which  held  the  pencil,  but  rather, 
it  would  appear,  more  with  regard  to  em- 
phasis than  grace.  Narcissus  had  lent  it 
to  the  queen  of  the  hour  with  special  in- 
structions to  that  end,  so  that  when  it  came 
to  him  again  he  might  ravish  his  soul  with 
the  hugging  assurance  given  by  the  thick 
lead  to  certain  ecstatic  lines  of  Endymion, 
such  as — 

*  My  soul  doth  melt 
For  the  unhappy  youth  ; ' 

'  He  surely  cannot  now 
Thirst  for  another  love  ; ' 

and  luxuriate  in  a  genial  sense  of  godship 
where  the  tremulous  pencil  had  left  the 
record  of  a  sigh  against — 

'  Each  tender  maiden  whom  he  once  thought  fair.' 

But  it  was  a  magnanimous  godship ;  and, 
after  a  moment's  leaning  back  with  closed 
eyes,  to  draw  in  all  the  sweet  incense,  how 
nobly  would  he  act,  in  imaginative  vignette, 
the  King  Cophetua  to  this  poor  suppliant 


36  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

of  love  ;  with  what  a  generous  waiving  of 
his  power — and  with  what  a  grace  ! — did  he 
see  himself  raising  her  from  her  knees,  and 
seating  her  at  his  right  hand.  Yet  those 
pencil-marks,  alas !  mark  but  a  secondary- 
interest  in  that  volume.  A  little  sketch  on 
the  fly-leaf,  'by  another  hand,'  witness  the 
prettier  memory.  A  sacred  valley,  guarded 
by  smooth,  green  hills  ;  in  the  midst  a  little 
lake,  fed  at  one  end  by  a  singing  stream, 
swallowed  at  the  other  by  the  roaring  dark- 
ness of  a  mill ;  green  rushes  prosperous  in 
the  shallows,  and  along  the  other  bank  an 
old  hedgerow  ;  a  little  island  in  the  midst, 
circled  by  silver  lilies ;  and  in  the  distance, 
rising  from  out  a  cloud  of  tangled  green, 
above  the  little  river,  an  old  church  tower. 
Below,  though  not '  in  the  picture,'  a  quaint 
country  house,  surrounded  by  a  garden  of 
fair  fruit-trees  and  wonderful  bowers,  through 
which  ran  the  stream,  free  once  again,  and 
singing  for  joy  of  the  light.  In  the  great  lone 
house  a  solitary  old  man,  cherished  and  ruled 
by — '  The  Miller's  Daughter.'  Was  scene  ever 
more  in  need  of  a  fairy  prince  ?  Narcissus 
sighed,  as  he  broke  upon  it  one  rosy  evening, 


OF    NARCISSUS  Z7 

to  think  what  little  meaning  all  its  beauty 
had,  suffering  that  lack  ;  but  as  he  had  come 
thither  with  the  purpose,  at  once  firm  and 
vague,  of  giving  it  a  memory,  he  could  afford 
to  sigh  till  morning's  light  brought,  maybe, 
the  opportunity  of  that  transfiguring  action. 
He  was  to  spend  an  Easter  fortnight  there, 
as  the  guest  of  some  farmer-relatives  with 
whom  he  had  stayed  years  before,  in  a 
period  to  which,  being  nineteen,  he  already 
alluded  as  his  *  boyhood.' 

And  it  is  not  quite  accurate  to  say  that  it 
had  no  memory  for  him,  for  he  brought  with 
him  one  of  that  very  miller's  daughter, 
though,  indeed,  it  was  of  the  shadowiest 
silver.  It  had  chanced  at  that  early  time 
that  an  influx  of  visitors  to  the  farm  had 
exceeded  the  sleeping  room,  and  he  and 
another  little  fellow  had  been  provided  with 
a  bed  in  the  miller's  house.  He  had  never 
quite  forgotten  that  bedroom — its  huge  old- 
fashioned  four-poster,  slumbrous  with  great 
dark  hangings,  such  as  Queen  Elizabeth 
seems  always  to  have  slept  in  ;  its  walls 
dim  with  tapestry,  and  its  screen  of  antique 
bead-work.      But   it   was    round    the   toilet 


38  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

table  that  memory  grew  brightest,  for  thereon 
was  a  crystal  phial  of  a  most  marvellous 
perfume,  and  two  great  mother-of-pearl 
shells,  shedding  a  mystical  radiance — the 
most  commonplace  Rimmel's,  without  doubt, 
and  the  shells  'dreadful,'  one  may  be  sure. 
But  to  him,  as  he  took  a  reverent  breath  of 
that  phial,  it  seemed  the  very  sweetbriar 
fragrance  of  her  gown  that  caught  his  sense  ; 
and,  surely,  he  never  in  all  the  world  found 
scent  like  that  again.  Thus,  long  after,  she 
would  come  to  him  in  day-dreams,  wafted 
on  its  strange  sweetness,  and  clothed  about 
with  that  mystical  lustre  of  pearl. 

There  were  five  years  between  him  and 
that  memory  as  he  stepped  into  that  en- 
chanted land  for  the  second  time.  The 
sweet  figure  of  young  womanhood  to  which 
he  had  turned  his  boyish  soul  in  hopeless 
worship,  when  it  should  have  been  busied 
rather  with  birds'  nests  and  rabbit-snares, 
had,  it  is  true,  come  to  him  in  dimmer 
outline  each  Spring,  but  with  magic  the 
deeper  for  that.  As  the  form  faded  from 
the  silver  halo,  and  passed  more  and  more 
into  mythology,  it  seemed,  indeed,  as  if  she 


OF    NARCISSUS  39 

had  never  lived  for  him  at  all,  save  in  dreams, 
or  on  another  star.  Still,  his  memory  held 
by  those  great  shells,  and  he  had  come  at 
last  to  the  fabled  country  on  the  perilous 
quest — who  of  us  dare  venture  such  a  one 
to-day? — of  a  'lost  saint'  Enquiry  of  his 
friends  that  evening,  cautious  as  of  one  on 
some  half-suspected  diplomacy,  told  him  that 
one  with  the  name  of  his  remembrance  did 
live  at  the  mill-house — with  an  old  father, 
too.  But  how  all  the  beauty  of  the  singing 
morning  became  a  scentless  flower  when, 
on  making  the  earliest  possible  call,  he  was 
met  at  the  door  with  that  hollow  word, 
'  Away ' — a  word  that  seemed  to  echo  through 
long  rooms  of  infinite  emptiness  and  turn 
the  daylight  shabby — till  the  addendum, '  for 
the  day,'  set  the  birds  singing  again,  and 
called  the  sunshine  back. 

A  few  nights  after  he  was  sitting  at  her 
side,  by  a  half-opened  window,  with  his  arm 
about  her  waist,  and  her  head  thrillingly  near 
his.  With  his  pretty  gift  of  recitation  he 
was  pouring  into  her  ear  that  sugared  passage 
in  Endymion,  appropriately  beginning,  '  O 
known  unknown,'  previously  '  got  up '  for  the 


40  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

purpose  ;  but  alas !  not  too  perfectly  to 
prevent  a  break-down,  though,  fortunately, 
at  a  point  that  admitted  a  ready  turn  to  the 
dilemma  :  — 

'  Still 
Let  me  entwine  thee  surer,  surer  .  .   .' 

Here  exigency  compelled  N.  to  make  surety 
doubly,  yea,  trebly,  sure  ;  but  memory  still 
forsaking  him,  the  rascal,  having  put  deeper 
and  deeper  significance  into  his  voice  with 
each  repetition,  dropped  it  altogether  as  he 
drew  her  close  to  him,  and  seemed  to  fail 
from  the  very  excess  of  love.  An  hour  after, 
he  was  bounding  into  the  moonlight  in  an 
intoxication  of  triumph.  She  was  won.  The 
beckoning  wonder  had  come  down  to  him. 
And  yet  it  was  real  moonlight — was  not 
that  his  own  grace  in  silhouette,  making  a 
mirror  even  of  the  hard  road  ? — real  grass 
over  which  he  had  softly  stept  from  her 
window,  real  trees,  all  real,  except — yes  ! 
was  it  real  love  ? 

In  the  lives  of  all  passionate  lovers  of 
women  there  are  two  broadly-marked  periods, 
and  in  some  a  third  :  slavery,  lordship,  and 
service.      The  first  is  the  briefest,  and  the 


OF    NARCISSUS  41 

third,  perhaps,  seldom  comes  ;    the  second 
is  the  most  familiar. 

Awakening,  like  our  forefather,  from  the 
deep  sleep  of  childish  things,  the  boy  finds 
a  being  by  his  side  of  a  strange  hushing 
fairness,  as  though  in  the  night  he  had 
opened  his  eyes  and  found  an  angel  by  his 
bed.  Speech  he  has  not  at  all,  and  his 
glance  dare  not  rise  beyond  her  bosom  ; 
till,  the  presence  seeming  gracious,  he  dares 
at  length  stretch  out  his  hand  and  touch  her 
gown  ;  whereon  an  inexplicable  new  joy 
trembles  through  him,  as  though  he  stood 
naked  in  a  May  meadow  through  the  golden 
rain  of  a  summer  shower.  Should  her  fingers 
touch  his  arm  by  chance,  it  is  as  though  they 
swept  a  harp,  and  a  music  of  piercing  sweet- 
ness runs  with  a  sudden  cry  along  his  blood. 
But  by  and  by  he  comes  to  learn  that  he  has 
made  a  comical  mistake  about  this  wonder. 
With  his  head  bent  low  in  worship,  he  had 
not  seen  the  wistfulness  of  her  gaze  on  him  ; 
and  one  day,  lo !  it  is  she  who  presses  close 
to  him  with  the  timid  appeal  of  a  fawn. 
Indeed,  she  has  all  this  time  been  to  him 
as  some  beautiful  woodland  creature  might 


42  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

have  seemed,  breaking  for  the  first  time  upon 
the  sight  of  primitive  man.  Fear,  wonder 
inexpressible,  worship,  till  a  sudden  laughing 
thought  of  comprehension,  then  a  lordly 
protectiveness,  and,  after  that — the  hunt ! 
At  once  the  masculine  self-respect  returns, 
and  the  wonder,  though  no  less  sweet  in 
itself,  becomes  but  another  form  of  tribute. 
With  Narcissus  this  evolution  had  taken 
place  early :  it  was  very  long  ago — he  felt 
old  even  then  to  think  of  it — since  Hesperus 
had  sung  like  a  nightingale  above  his  first 
kiss,  and  his  memory  counted  many  trophies 
of  lordship.  But,  surely,  this  last  was  of  all 
the  starriest ;  perhaps,  indeed,  so  wonderful 
was  it,  it  might  prove  the  very  love  which 
would  bring  back  again  the  dream  that  had 
seemed  lost  for  ever  with  the  passing  of  that 
mythical  first  maid  so  long  ago,  a  love  in 
which  worship  should  be  all  once  more,  and 
godship  none  at  all.  But  is  not  such  a 
question  all  too  certainly  its  own  answer  ? 
Nay,  Narcissus,  if  indeed  you  find  that 
wonder-maid  again,  you  will  not  question 
so;  you  will  forget  to  watch  that  graceful 
shadow  in  the  moonlight ;   you  will  but  ask 


OF    NARCISSUS  43 

to  sit  by  her  silent,  as  of  old,  to  follow  her  to 
the  end  of  the  world.     Ah  me ! 

'  How  many  queens  have  ruled  and  passed 

Since  first  we  met ; 

How  thick  and  fast 
The  letters  used  to  come  at  first, 

How  thin  at  last ; 
Then  ceased,  and  winter  for  a  space  ! 

Until  another  hand 

Brought  spring  into  the  land, 
And  went  the  seasons'  pace.' 

That  Miller's  Daughter,  although  '  so  dear, 
so  dear,'  why,  of  course,  she  was  not  that 
maid  :  but  again  the  silver  halo  has  grown 
about  her ;  again  Narcissus  asks  himself, 
*  Did  she  live,  or  did  I  dream  ? ' ;  again  she 
comes  to  him  at  whiles,  wafted  on  that 
strange  incense,  and  clothed  about  in  that 
mystical  lustre  of  pearl. 

Doubtless,  she  lives  in  that  fabled  country 
still  :  but  Narcissus  has  grown  sadly  wise 
since  then,  and  he  goes  on  pilgrimage  no 
more. 


44  THE    BOOK-BILLS 


CHAPTER  V 

AN  IDYLL  OF  ALICE  SUNSHINE,  WHICH 
REALLY  BELONGS  TO  THE  LAST  CHAPTER 

If  the  Reader  has  heard  enough  of  the 
amourettes  of  the  young  gentleman  upon 
whose  memoirs  I  am  engaged,  let  him  skip 
this  chapter  and  pass  to  the  graver  chapters 
beyond.  My  one  aim  is  the  Reader's 
pleasure,  and  I  carry  my  solicitude  so  far 
that  if  he  finds  his  happiness  to  lie  outside 
these  pages  altogether,  has  no  choice  among 
these  various  chapters,  but  prefers  none  to 
any,  I  am  quite  content.  Such  a  spirit  of 
self-abnegation,  the  Reader  must  admit,  is 
true  love. 

Perhaps  it  was  an  early  unconscious  birth- 
impulse  of  the  true  love  some  day  to  be 
born  in  his  heart,  that  caused  Narcissus  to 
make  a  confession  to  his  Miller's  Daughter, 
on  one  of  their  pretty  decorative  evenings, 


OF    NARCISSUS  45 

when  they  sat  together  at  the  fireside,  while 
the  scent  of  the  climbing  roses,  and  the  light 
of  the  climbing  moon,  came  in  at  the  window. 

The  immediate  effect  of  the  confession 
was — no  wonder — to  draw  tears.  And  how 
beautiful  she  looked  in  tears  !  Who  would 
dive  for  pearls  when  the  pearl-fisheries  of  a 
woman's  eyes  are  his  to  rifle  ? 

Beautiful,  beautiful  tears,  flow  on — no  dull, 
leaden  rain,  no  mere  monotonous  deluge, 
but  a  living,  singing  fountain,  crowned  with 
such  rainbows  as  hang  roses  and  stars  in  the 
fine  mist  of  samite  waterfalls,  irradiated  by 
gleaming  shafts  of  lovely  anger  and  scorn. 

Like  Northern  Lights  on  autumn  evenings, 
the  maiden's  eyes  pierced  Narcissus  through 
and  through  with  many-coloured  spears. 
There  was  thunder,  too ;  the  earth  shook — 
just  a  little :  but  soon  Narcissus  saw  the 
white  dove  of  peace  flying  to  him  through 
the  glancing  showers.  For  all  her  sorrow, 
his  was  the  peace  of  confession.  His  little 
lie  had  been  acknowledged,  his  treason  self- 
betrayed. 

And  it  was  this. 

I    have   hinted   that    Narcissus,   like   the 


46         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

Catholic  Church,  worshipped  many  saints. 
At  this  time,  one  of  them,  by  a  thrilling 
coincidence,  chanced  to  have  her  shrine  at  a 
boarding-school,  some  fifteen  miles  or  so 
from  the  mill-pond  on  whose  banks  the 
Miller's  Daughter  had  drawn  into  her  lovely 
face  so  much  of  the  beauty  of  the  world. 
Alice  Sunshine,  shall  we  call  her,  was  per- 
haps more  of  a  cherub  than  a  saint ;  a  rosy, 
laughing,  plump  little  arrangement  of  sun- 
shiny pink  and  white  flesh,  with  blue  eyes 
and  golden  hair.  Alice  was  not  over- 
burdened with  intellectuality,  and,  like  others 
of  her  sex,  her  heart  was  nothing  like  so 
soft  as  her  bosom.  Narcissus  had  first  been 
in  love  with  her  sister  ;  but  he  and  the  sister 
— a  budding  woman  of  the  world — had  soon 
agreed  that  they  were  not  born  for  each 
other,  and  Narcissus  had  made  the  transfer 
of  his  tragic  passion  with  inexpensive  in- 
formality. As  the  late  Anthony  Trollope 
would  finish  one  novel  to-night,  and  begin 
another  to  -  morrow  morning,  so  would 
Narcissus  be  off  with  the  old  love  this 
Sunday,  and  visibly  on  with  the  new  the 
next. 


OF    NARCISSUS  47 

Dear  little  plump,  vegetable-marrow  Alice ! 
Will  Narcissus  ever  forget  that  Sunday- 
night  when  the  church,  having  at  last 
released  its  weary  worshippers,  he  stole, 
not  as  aforetime  to  the  soft  side  of  Emily, 
but  to  the  still  softer  side  of  the  little 
bewildered  Alice.  For,  though  Alice  had 
worshipped  him  all  the  time,  and  certainly 
during  the  whole  of  the  service,  she  had 
never  dared  to  hope  that  he  would  pass  her 
dashing,  dark-eyed  sister  to  love  her — little, 
blonde,  phlegmatic,  blue-eyed  Alice. 

But  Apollo  was  bent  on  the  capture  of  his 
Daphne.  Truth  to  say,  it  was  but  the  work 
of  a  moment.  The  golden  arrow  was  in  her 
heart,  the  wound  kissed  whole  again,  and 
the  new  heaven  and  the  new  earth  all 
arranged  for,  in  hardly  longer  time  than  it 
takes  to  tell. 

In  youth  the  mystery  of  woman  is  still  so 
fresh  and  new,  that  to  make  a  fuss  about  a 
particular  woman  seems  like  looking  a  gift- 
horse  of  the  gods  in  the  mouth.  The  light 
on  the  face  of  womanhood  in  general  is  so 
bewilderingly  beautiful  that  the  young  man 
literally  cannot  tell  one  woman  from  another. 


48  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

They  are  all  equally  wonderful.  Masculine 
observation  leads  one  to  suppose  that 
woman's  first  vision  of  man  similarly  pre- 
cludes discrimination. 

Ah  me  !  it  is  easy  to  laugh  to-day,  but  it 
was  heart  -  bleeding  tragedy  when  those 
powers  that  oughtn't  to  be  decreed  Alice's 
exile  to  a  boarding-school  in  some  central 
Africa  of  the  midland  counties. 

The  hemorrhage  of  those  two  young  hearts! 
But,  for  a  time,  each  plastered  the  other's 
wounds  with  letters — dear  letters — letters 
every  post.  For  the  postal  authorities  made 
no  objection  to  Narcissus  corresponding 
with  two  or  more  maidens  at  once.  And  it 
is  only  fair  to  Alice  to  say,  that  she  knew  as 
little  of  the  Miller's  Daughter  as  the  Miller's 
Daughter  knew  of  her. 

So,  when  Narcissus  was  reciting  Endyniio7i 
to  his  Miller's  Maid,  it  was  not  without  a 
minor  chord  plaining  through  the  major 
harmonies  of  the  present  happiness ;  the 
sense  that  Alice  was  but  fifteen  miles  away 
— so  near  she  could  almost  hear  him  if  he 
called — only  fifteen  miles  away,  and  it  was 
a  long  three  months  since  they  had  met. 


OF    NARCISSUS  49 

It  now  becomes  necessary  to  admit  a 
prosaic  fact  hitherto  concealed  from  the 
Reader.  Narcissus  rode  a  bicycle.  It  was,  I 
must  confess,  a  rather  '  modern  '  thing  to  do. 
But  surely  the  flashing  airy  wheel  is  the 
most  poetical  mode  of  locomotion  yet  in- 
vented, and  one  looks  more  like  a  fairy 
prince  than  ever  in  knickerbockers.  When- 
ever Narcissus  turned  his  gleaming  spokes 
along  some  mapped,  but  none  the  less 
mysterious,  county  -  road,  he  thought  of 
Lohengrin  in  his  barge  drawn  by  white  swans 
to  his  mystic  tryst ;  he  thought  of  the  seven- 
leagued  boots,  the  flying  carpet,  the  wishing- 
cap,  and  the  wooden  Pegasus, — so  called 
because  it  mounted  into  the  clouds  on  the 
turning  of  a  peg.  As  he  passed  along  by 
mead  and  glade,  his  wheel  sang  to  him,  and 
he  sang  to  his  wheel.  It  was  a  daisied, 
daisied  world. 

There  were  buttercups  and  violets  in  it  too 
as  he  sped  along  in  the  early  morning  of  an 
unforgotten  Easter  Sunday,  drawn,  so  he  had 
shamelessly  told  his  Miller's  Daughter,  by 
antiquarian  passion  to  visit  the  famous  old 
parish  church  near  which  Alice  was  at 
D 


so  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

school.  Antiquarian  passion !  Well,  cer- 
tainly it  is  an  antiquarian  passion  now. 

But  then — how  his  heart  beat !  how  his 
eyes  shone  as  with  burning  kohl !  That 
there  was  anything  to  be  ashamed  of  in  this 
stolen  ride  never  even  occurred  to  him.  And 
perhaps  there  was  little  wrong  in  it,  after  all. 
Perhaps,  when  the  secrets  of  all  hearts  are 
revealed,  it  will  come  out  that  the  Miller's 
Daughter  took  the  opportunity  to  meet 
Narcissus'  understudy, — who  can  tell  ? 

But  the  wonderful  fresh  morning-scented 
air  was  a  delicious  fact  beyond  dispute. 
That  was  sincere.  Ah,  there  used  to  be  real 
mornings  then ! — not  merely  interrupted 
nights. 

And  it  was  the  Easter-morning  of  romance. 
There  was  a  sweet  passionate  Sabbath-feel- 
ing everywhere.  Sabbath-bells,  and  Sab- 
bath-birds, and  Sabbath-flowers.  There  was 
even  a  feeling  of  restful  Sabbath-cheer  about 
the  old  inn,  where,  at  last,  entering  with 
much  awe  the  village  where  Alice  nightly 
slept — clothed  in  white  samite,  mystic,  won- 
derful,— Narcissus  provided  for  the  demands 
of  romance  by  a  hearty  country  breakfast. 


OF    NARCISSUS  51 

A  manna  of  blessing  seemed  to  lie  thick 
upon  every  thing.  The  very  ham  and  eggs 
seemed  as  if  they  had  been  blessed  by  the 
Pope. 

It  was  yet  an  hour  to  church-time,  an  hour 
usually  one  of  spiteful  alacrity ;  but  this 
morning,  it  seemed,  in  defiance  of  the  clock, 
cruelly  unpunctual.  After  breakfast,  Nar- 
cissus strolled  about  the  town,  and  inquired 
the  way  to  Miss  Curlpaper's  school.  It 
stood  outside  the  little  town.  It  was  pointed 
out  to  him  in  the  distance,  across  billowy 
clouds  of  pear  and  apple-blossom,  making 
the  hollow  in  which  the  town  nestled  seem  a 
vast  pot-pourri  jar,  overflowing  with  newly 
gathered  rose-leaves. 

Had  the  Miller's  Daughter  been  able  to 
watch  his  movements,  she  would  have  re- 
marked that  his  antiquarian  ardour  drew 
him  not  to  the  church,  but  to  a  sombre 
many-windowed  house  upon  the  hill. 

Narcissus  reconnoitred  the  prison-like 
edifice  from  behind  a  hedge,  then  summoned 
courage  to  walk  past  with  slow  nonchalance. 
All  was  as  dead  and  dull  as  though  Alice 
was  not  there.     Yet  somewhere  within  those 


52  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

prison-walls  her  young  beauty  was  dressing 
itself  to  meet  the  spring.  Perhaps,  in  de- 
licious linen,  soft  and  white,  she  was  dash- 
ing cool  water  about  her  rosebud  face,  or, 
flushed  with  exhilaration,  was  pinning  up 
the  golden  fleeces  of  her  hair.  Perhaps  she 
was  eating  wonderful  bacon  and  eggs ! 
Could  she  be  thinking  of  him  ?  She 
little  knew  how  near  he  was  to  her.  He 
had  not  written  of  his  coming.  Letters  at 
Miss  Curlpaper's  had  to  pass  an  inspection 
much  more  rigorous  than  the  Customs,  but 
still  smuggling  was  not  unknown.  For 
success,  however,  carefully  laid  plans  and 
regular  dates  were  necessary,  and  Narcissus' 
visit  had  fallen  between  the  dates. 

No  !  there  was  no  sign  of  her.  She  was 
as  invisible  as  the  moon  at  mid-day.  And 
there  were  the  church-bells  beginning  to  call 
her  :  *  Alice,  Alice,  put  on  your  things ! ' 

'  Alice,  Alice,  put  on  your  things  ! 
The  birds  are  calling,  the  church  bell  rings  ; 
The  sun  is  shining,  and  I  am  here, 
Waiting — and  waiting — for  you,  my  dear. 

Alice,  Alice,  doff  your  gown  of  night, 
Draw  on  your  bodice  as  lilies  white, 
Draw  on  your  petticoats,  clasp  your  stays, — 
Oh !  Alice,  Alice,  those  milky  ways  ! 


OF    NARCISSUS  53 

Alice,  Alice,  how  long  you  are  ! 
The  hour  is  late  and  the  church  is  far  ; 
Slowly,  more  slowly,  the  church  bell  rings — 
Alice,  Alice,  put  on  your  things  !' 


Really  it  was  not  in  Narcissus'  plans  to 
wait  at  the  school  till  Alice  appeared.  The 
Misses  Curlpaper  were  terrible  unknown 
quantities  to  him.  For  a  girl  to  have  a  boy 
hanging  about  the  premises  was  a  capital 
crime,  he  knew.  Boys  are  to  girls'  schools 
what  Anarchists  are  to  public  buildings. 
They  come  under  the  Explosives  Acts.  It 
was  not,  indeed,  within  the  range  of  his  hope 
that  he  might  be  able  to  speak  to  Alice.  A 
look,  a  long,  immortal,  all-expressive  look, 
was  all  he  had  travelled  fifteen  miles  to  give 
and  win.  For  that  he  would  have  travelled 
fifteen  hundred. 

His  idea  was  to  sit  right  in  front  of  the 
nave,  where  Alice  could  not  miss  seeing  him 
— where  others  could  see  him  too  in  his 
pretty  close-fitting  suit  of  Lincoln  green.  So 
down  through  the  lanes  he  went,  among  the 
pear  and  apple  orchards,  from  out  whose 
blossom  the  clanging  tower  of  the  old 
church  jutted  sheer,  like  some  Bass  Rock 


54         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

amid  rosy  clustering  billows.  Their  love  had 
been  closely  associated  from  its  beginning 
with  the  sacred  things  of  the  church,  so 
regular  had  been  their  attendance,  not  only 
on  Sundays,  but  at  week-night  services.  To 
Alice  and  Narcissus  there  were  two  Sabbaths 
in  the  week,  Sunday  and  Wednesday.  I 
suppose  they  were  far  from  being  the  only 
young  people  interested  in  their  particular 
form  of  church-work.  Leander  met  Hero,  it 
will  be  remembered,  on  the  way  to  church, 
and  the  Reader  may  recall  Marlowe's  beauti- 
ful description  of  her  dress  upon  that  fatal 
morning  : 

'  The  outside  of  her  garments  were  of  lawn, 
The  lining  purple  silk,  with  gilt  stars  drawn  ; 
Her  wide  sleeves  green,  and  bordered  with  a  grove, 
Where  Venus  in  her  naked  glory  strove 
To  please  the  careless  and  disdainful  eyes 
Of  proud  Adonis,  that  before  her  lies  ; 
Her  kirtle  blue,  whereon  was  many  a  stain, 
Made  with  the  blood  of  wretched  lovers  slain.  .  .   .' 

Alice  wore  pretty  dresses  too,  if  less 
elaborate ;  and,  despite  its  change  of  name, 
was  not  the  church  where  she  and  Narcissus 
met,  as  the  church  wherein  Hero  and  Leander 
first  looked  upon  each  other,  the  Temple  of 


OF    NARCISSUS  55 

Love?  Certainly  the  country  church  to 
which  Narcissus  self-consciously  passed 
through  groups  of  Sunday-clothed  villagers, 
was  decked  as  for  no  Christian  festival  this 
Sabbath  morning.  The  garlands  that  twined 
about  the  old  Norman  columns,  the  clumps 
of  primroses  and  violets  that  sprung  at  their 
feet,  as  at  the  roots  of  gigantic  beeches,  the 
branches  of  palm  and  black-thorn  that 
transformed  the  chancel  to  a  bower :  pro- 
bably for  more  than  knew  it,  these  symbols 
of  the  joy  and  beauty  of  earth  had  simpler, 
more  instinctive,  meanings  than  those  of 
any  arbitrary  creed.  For  others  in  the 
church  besides  Narcissus,  no  doubt,  they 
spoke  of  young  love,  the  bloom  and  the 
fragrance  thereof,  of  mating  birds  and  pair- 
ing men  and  maids,  of  the  eternal  principle 
of  loveliness,  which,  in  spite  of  winter  and  of 
wrong,  brings  flowers  and  faces  to  bless  and 
beautify  this  church  of  the  world. 

As  Narcissus  sat  in  his  front  row,  his 
eyes  drawn  up  in  a  prayer  to  the  painted 
glories  of  the  great  east  window,  his  whole 
soul  lifted  up  on  the  wings  of  colour,  scent, 
and  sound — the  whole  sacred  house  had  but 


56  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

one  meaning :  just  his  love  for  Alice.  No- 
thing in  the  world  was  too  holy  to  image 
that.  The  windows,  the  music,  the  flowers, 
all  were  metaphors  of  her  :  and,  as  the  organ 
swirled  his  soul  along  in  the  rapids  of  its 
passionate,  prayerful  sound,  it  seemed  to 
him  that  Alice  and  he  already  stood  at  the 
gate  of  Heaven  ! 

Presently,  across  his  mingled  sensations 
came  a  measured  tramp  as  of  boy-soldiers 
marching  in  line.  You  have  heard  it !  You 
have  listened  for  it ! !  It  was  the  dear, 
unmistakable  sound  of  a  girls'  school  on 
the  march.  Quickly  it  came  nearer,  it  was 
in  the  porch — it  was  in  the  church!  Narcissus 
gave  a  swift  glance  round.  He  dare  not  give 
a  real  searching  look  yet.  His  heart  beat 
too  fast,  his  cheek  burned  too  red.  But  he 
saw  it  was  a  detachment  of  girls — it  certainly 
was  Alice's  school. 

Then  came  the  white-robed  choristers,  and 
the  white-haired  priests  :  If  we  say  that  we 
have  no  sitt,  zve  deceive  ourselves,  and  the  truth 
is  not  in  us ;  but,  if  we  co?tfess  our  sins,  He 
is  faithful  and  just  to  forgive  us  our  sins, 
and  to  cleanse  us  from  all  um'ighteousness. 


OF    NARCISSUS  57 

Dearly  Beloved  Brethren.  .  .  . 

His  heart  swelled  with  a  sobbing  exalta- 
tion of  worship  such  as  he  had  not  known 
for  years.  You  could  hardly  have  believed 
that  a  little  apple-dumpling  of  a  pink  and 
white  girl  was  the  real  inspirer  of  that  look 
in  his  young  face  that  made  old  ladies,  even 
more  than  young  ones,  gaze  at  him,  and 
remark  afterwards  on  the  strange  boy  with 
the  lovely  spiritual  expression. 

But,  all  the  time,  Narcissus  felt  that  Alice's 
great  eyes  were  on  him,  glowing  with  glad 
surprise.  The  service  proceeded,  but  yet  he 
forbore  to  seek  her.  He  took  a  delight  in 
husbanding  his  coming  joy.  He  would  not 
crudely  snatch  it.  It  would  be  all  the 
sweeter  for  waiting.  And  the  fire  in  Alice's 
eyes  would  all  the  time  be  growing  softer 
and  softer.  He  nearly  looked  as  he  thought 
of  that.  And  surely  that  was  her  dear  voice 
calling  to  him  in  the  secret  language  of  the 
psalm.  He  sang  back  to  her  with  a  wild 
rapture.  Thus  the  morning  stars  sang 
together,  he  thought. 

And  when  the  prayers  laid  lovely  hands 
across  the  eyes  of  the  worshippers,  still  he 


58         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

sought  not  Alice,  but  prayed  for  her  as 
perhaps  only  a  boy  can  :  O  Lord  God,  be 
good  to  Alice — already  she  is  one  of  thy 
angels.  May  her  life  be  filled  with  light 
and  joy !  And  if  in  the  time  to  come  I  am 
worthy  of  being  ever  by  her  side,  may  we 
live  our  lives  together,  high  and  pure  and 
holy  as  always  in  thy  sight !  Lord,  thou 
knowest  how  pure  is  my  love  ;  how  I  worship 
her  as  I  worship  the  holy  angels  themselves. 
But  whatsoever  is  imperfect  perfect  by  the 
inspiration  of  thy  Holy  Spirit.  .  .  . 

So  prayed  the  soul  of  the  boy  for  the  soul 
of  the  girl,  and  his  eyes  filled  with  tears  as 
he  prayed  ;  the  cup  of  the  wonder  and 
holiness  of  the  world  ran  over. 

Already,  it  seemed,  that  Alice  and  he  lay 
clasped  together  in  the  arms  of  God. 

So  Narcissus  prayed  and  sang  his  love  in 
terms  of  an  alien  creed.  He  sang  of  the 
love  of  Christ,  he  thought  but  of  the  love  of 
Alice ;  and  still  he  refrained  from  pluck- 
ing that  wonderful  passion-flower  of  her 
glance. 

At  length  he  had  waited  the  whole  service 
through  ;  and,  with  the  last  hallowed  vibra- 


OF   NARCISSUS  59 

tions  of  the  benediction,  he  turned  his  eyes, 
brimful  of  love-light,  greedily,  eagerly,  fear- 
ful lest  one  single  ray  should  be  wasted  on 
intermediate  and  irrelevant  worshippers. 

Wonderful  eyes  of  love  ! — but  alas  !  where 
is  their  Alice?  Wildly  they  glance  along 
the  rosy  ranks  of  chubby  girlhood,  but  where 
is  their  Alice? 

And  then  the  ranks  form  in  line,  and  once 
more  the  sound,  the  ecstatic  sound  it  had 
seemed  but  a  short  time  before,  of  girls 
marching — but  no  ! — no ! — there  is  no  Alice. 

In  sick  despair  Narcissus  stalked  that 
Amazonian  battalion,  crouching  behind 
hedges,  dropping  into  by-lanes,  lurking  in 
coppices, — he  held  his  breath  as  they  passed 
two  and  two  within  a  yard  of  him.  Two 
followed  two,  but  still  no  Alice ! 

Narcissus  lay  in  wait,  dinnerless,  all  that 
afternoon ;  he  walked  about  that  dreary  house 
like  a  patrol,  till  at  last  he  was  observed 
of  the  inmates,  and  knots  of  girls  gathered 
at  the  windows — alas !  only  to  giggle  at  his 
forlorn  and  desperate  appearance. 

Still  there  was  no  Alice  .  .  .  and  then  it 
began   to  rain,  and  he  became  aware  how 


6o         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

hungry  he  was.  So  he  returned  to  his  inn 
with  a  sad  heart. 

And  all  the  time  poor  little  Alice  lay  in 
bed  with  a  sore  throat,  oblivious  of  those 
passionate  boyish  eyes  that,  you  would  have 
thought,  must  have  pierced  the  very  walls 
of  her  seclusion. 

And,  after  all,  it  was  not  her  voice 
Narcissus  had  heard  in  the  church.  It  was 
but  the  still  sweeter  voice  of  his  own  heart. 


OF    NARCISSUS  6i 


CHAPTER   VI 

THE    SIBYLLINE    BOOKS 

I  HOPE  it  will  be  allowed  to  me  that  I  treat 
the  Reader  with  all  respectful  courtesy,  and 
that  I  am  well  bred  enough  to  assume  him 
familiar  with  all  manner  of  exquisite  ex- 
perience, though  in  my  heart  I  may  be  no 
less  convinced  that  he  has  probably  gone 
through  life  with  nothing  worth  calling  ex- 
perience whatsoever.  It  is  our  jaunty  modern 
fashion,  and  I  follow  it  so  far  as  I  am  able. 
I  take  for  granted,  for  instance,  that  every 
man  has  at  one  time  or  another — in  his 
salad  days,  you  know,  before  he  was  em- 
barked in  his  particular  provision  business 
— had  foolish  yearnings  towards  poesy.  I 
respect  the  mythical  dreams  of  his  'young 
days ' ;  I  assume  that  he  has  been  really  in 
love ;  but,  pray  press  me  not  too  curiously 


62  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

as  to  whether  I  believe  it  all,  as  to  whether  I 
really  imagine  that  his  youth  knew  other 
dreams  than  those  of  the  foolish  young 
'  masherdom '  one  meets  in  the  train  every 
morning,  or  that  he  has  married  a  wife  for 
other  than  purely  '  masculine '  reasons. 

These  matters  I  do  not  mind  leaving  in 
the  form  of  a  postulate — let  them  be  granted : 
but  that  every  man  has  at  one  time  or 
another  had  the  craze  for  saving  the  world 
I  will  not  assume.  Narcissus  took  it  very 
early,  and  though  he  has  been  silent  con- 
cerning his  mission  for  some  time,  and  when 
last  we  heard  of  it  had  considerably  modified 
his  propaganda,  he  still  cherishes  it  some- 
where in  secret,  I  have  little  doubt ;  and  one 
may  not  be  surprised,  one  of  these  days,  to 
find  it  again  bursting  out  '  into  sudden 
flame.' 

His  spiritual  experience  has  probably  been 
the  deepest  and  keenest  of  his  life.  I  do 
not  propose  to  trace  his  evolution  from 
Anabaptism  to  Agnosticism.  The  steps 
of  such  development  are  comparatively 
familiar ;  they  have  been  traced  by  greater 
pens  than  mine.  The  '  means '  may  vary, 
but  the  process  is  uniform. 


OF    NARCISSUS  6^:, 

Whether  a  man  deserts  the  ancestral 
Brahminism  that  has  so  long  been  'good 
enough  for  his  parents,'  and  Hstens  to  the 
voice  of  the  Buddhist  missionary,  or  joins 
Lucian  in  the  seat  of  the  scornful,  shrugging 
at  augur  and  philosopher  alike  ;  whether  it 
is  Voltaire,  or  Tom  Paine,  or  Thomas 
Carlyle,  or  Walt  Whitman,  or  a  Socialist 
tract,  that  is  the  emancipator,  the  emancipa- 
tion is  all  one. 

The  seed  that  is  to  rend  the  rock  comes  in 
all  manner  of  odd,  and  often  unremembered, 
ways  ;  but  somehow,  it  is  there ;  rains  and 
dews  unnoticed  feed  it ;  and  surely,  one  day 
the  rock  is  rent,  the  light  is  pouring  in,  and 
we  are  free  !  It  is  often  a  matter  of  anguish 
that,  strive  as  we  may,  it  is  impossible  to 
remember  what  helping  hand  it  was  that 
sowed  for  us.  Our  fickle  memory  seems  to 
convict  us  of  ingratitude,  and  yet  we  know 
how  far  that  sin  is  from  us  ;  and  how,  if 
those  sowers  could  but  be  revealed  to  us,  we 
would  fall  upon  their  necks,  or  at  their  feet. 

I  talked  of  this  one  day  with  Narcissus, 
and  some  time  after  he  sent  me  a  few  notes 
headed  '  Spiritual  Pastors,'  in  which  he  had 


64  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

striven  to  follow  the  beautiful  example  set 
by  Marcus  Aurelius,  in  the  anxiously  loving 
acknowledgment  with  which  he  opens  his 
meditations.  I  know  he  regarded  it  as 
miserably  inefficient ;  but  as  it  does  actually 
indicate  some  of  the  more  individual  side  of 
his  experience,  and  is,  moreover,  character- 
istic in  its  style,  I  shall  copy  a  few  passages 
from  it  here  : — 

'To  some  person  or  persons  unknown 
exceeding  gratitude  for  the  suggestion,  in 
some  dim  talk,  antenatal  it  would  almost 
seem,  that  Roman  Catholics  might,  after  all, 
be  "  saved."  Blessed  fecundating  suggestion, 
that  was  the  earliest  loophole  ! 

*To  my  father  I  owe  a  mind  that,  once 
set  on  a  clue,  must  follow  it,  if  need  be,  to 
the  nethermost  darkness,  though  he  has 
chosen  to  restrict  the  operation  of  his  own 
within  certain  limits  ;  and  to  my  mother  a 
natural  leaning  to  the  transcendental  side  of 
an  alternative,  which  has  saved  me  so  many 
a  time  when  reason  had  thrown  me  into  the 
abyss.  But  one's  greatest  debt  to  a  good 
mother  must  be  simply — herself 

'  To   the    Rev.    Father   Ignatius    for    his 


OF    NARCISSUS  65 

earnest  preaching,  which  might  almost  have 
made  me  a  monk,  had  not  Thomas  Carlyle 
and  his  Heroes,  especially  the  lecture  on 
Mahomet,  given  me  to  understand  the  true 
significance  of  a  Messiah. 

'To  Bulwer  for  his  Zanoni,  which  first 
gave  me  a  hint  of  the  possible  natural 
"  supernatural,"  and  thus  for  ever  saved  me 
from  dogmatising  in  negatives  against  the 
transcendental. 

'To  Sir  Edwin  Arnold  for  his  Light  of 
Asia,  also  to  Mr.  Sinnett  for  his  Esoteric 
Buddhism,  books  which,  coming  to  me  about 
the  same  time,  together  with  some  others 
like  them,  first  gave  some  occupation  to  an 
"  unchartered  freedom,"  gained  in  many  for- 
gotten steps,  in  the  form  of  a  faith  which 
transfigured  my  life  for  many  months  into 
the  most  beautiful  enthusiasm  a  man  could 
know, — and  which  had  almost  sent  me  to 
the  Himalayas ! 

'  That  it  did  not  quite  achieve  that,  though 
much  of  the  light  it  gave  me  still  remains,  I 
owe  to  R.  M.,  who,  with  no  dialectic,  but 
with  one  bald  question,  and  the  reading  of 
one  poem,  robbed  me  of  my  fairy  palace  of 
E 


66  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

Oriental  speculation  in  the  twinkling  of  an 
eye.  Why  it  went  I  have  never  really  quite 
known ;  but  surely,  it  was  gone,  and  the 
wind  and  the  bare  star-light  were  alone  in 
its  place. 

'  Dear  Mac,  I  have  not  seen  you  for  ever 
so  long,  and  surely  you  have  forgotten  how 
that  night,  long  ago,  you  asked  with  such  a 
strange,  almost  childlike,  simplicity :  "  Is 
there  a  soul  ? "  But  I  have  not  forgotten, 
nor  how  I  made  no  answer  at  all,  but  only 
staggered,  and  how,  with  your  strange, 
dreamy  voice,  you  chanted  for  comfort : — 

'  "This  hot,  hard  flame  with  which  our  bodies  burn 
Will  make  some  meadow  blaze  with  daffodil ; 

Ay  !  and  those  argent  breasts  of  thine  will  turn 
To  water-lilies  ;  the  brown  fields  men  till 

Will  be  more  fruitful  for  our  love  to-night : 

Nothing  is  lost  in  Nature  ;   all   things  live  in  Death's 
despite. 


'  "  So  when  men  bury  us  beneath  the  yew 

Thy  crimson-stained  mouth  a  rose  will  be, 
And  thy  soft  eyes  lush  blue-bells  dimmed  with  dew  ; 

And  when  the  white  narcissus  wantonly 
Kisses  the  wind,  its  playmate,  some  faint  joy 
Will  thrill  our  dust,  and  we  will  be  again  fond  maid 
and  boy. 


OF    NARCISSUS  6j 

* "     .         .         .         .         How  my  heart  leaps  up 

To  think  of  that  grand  living  after  death 
In  beast  and  bird  and  flower,  when  this  cup, 

Being  filled  too  full  of  spirit,  bursts  for  breath. 
And  with  the  pale  leaves  of  some  autumn  day, 
The   soul,    earth's   earliest    conqueror,    becomes   earth's 
last  great  prey. 

•  "O  think  of  it  !     We  shall  inform  ourselves 

Into  all  sensuous  life  ;  the  goat-foot  faun. 
The  centaur,  or  the  merry,  bright-eyed  elves 

That  leave  their  dancing  rings  to  spite  the  dawn 
Upon  the  meadows,  shall  not  be  more  near 
Than  you  and  I  to  Nature's  mysteries,  for  we  shall  hear 

'  "The  thrush's  heart  beat,  and  the  daisies  grow, 

And  the  wan  snowdrop  sighing  for  the  sun 
On  sunless  days  in  winter  ;  we  shall  know 

By  whom  the  silver  gossamer  is  spun, 
Who  paints  the  diapered  fritillaries, 
On  what  wide  wings  from  shivering  pine  to  pine  the 
eagle  flies. 


'  "We  shall  be  notes  in  that  great  symphony 

Whose  cadence  circles  through  the  rhythmic  spheres. 

And  all  the  live  world's  throbbing  heart  shall  be 
One  with  our  heart ;  the  stealthy,  creeping  years 

Have  lost  their  terrors  now  ;  we  shall  not  die — 

The  universe  itself  shall  be  our  Immortality  !" 

Have  you  forgotten  how  you  chanted  these, 
and  told  me  they  were  Oscar  Wilde's.  You 
had  set  my  feet  firmly  on  earth  for  the  first 
time,  there  was  great  darkness  with  me  for 
many   weeks,   but,   as    it    lifted,    the    earth 


68  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

seemed  greener  than  ever  of  old,  the  sun- 
shine a  goodlier  thing,  and  verily  a  blessed- 
ness indeed  to  draw  the  breath  of  life.  I 
had  learnt  "the  value  and  significance  of 
flesh "  ;  I  no  longer  scorned  a  carnal  diet, 
and  once  again  I  turned  my  eyes  on  the 
damsels  in  the  street. 

'  But  an  influence  soon  came  to  me  that 
kept  me  from  going  all  the  way  with  you,  and 
taught  me  to  say,  "  I  know  not,"  where  you 
would  say,  "  It  is  not."  Blessings  on  thee 
who  didst  throw  a  rainbow,  that  may  mean 
a  promise,  across  the  void,  that  awoke  the 
old  instinct  of  faith  within  me,  and  has  left 
me  "  an  Agnostic  with  a  faith,"  quite  content 
with  "the  brown  earth,"  if  that  be  all,  but 
with  the  added  significance  a  mystery 
gives  to  living ; — thou  who  first  didst  teach 
me  Love's  lore  aright,  to  thee  do  I  owe 
this  thing. 

*  To  J.  A.  W.  I  owe  the  first  great  know- 
ledge of  that  other  love  between  man  and 
man,  which  Whitman  has  since  taught  us  to 
call  "the  dear  love  of  comrades";  and  to 
him  I  owe  that  I  never  burned  those  early 
rhymes,  or^broke  my  little  reed — an  unequi- 


OF    NARCISSUS  69 

vocal   service   to   me,  whatever  the  public, 
should  it  be  consulted,  may  think. 

*  To  a  dear  sister  I  owe  that  still  more 
exquisite  and  subtle  comradeship  which  can 
only  exist  between  man  and  woman,  but 
from  which  the  more  disturbing  elements  of 
sex  must  be  absent.  And  here,  let  me  also 
thank  God  that  I  was  brought  up  in  quite 
a  garden  of  good  sisters. 

'  To  Messrs.  C.  and  W.,  Solicitors  and 
Notaries,  I  owe,  albeit  I  will  say  no  thanks  to 
them,  the  opportunity  of  that  hardly  learned 
good  which  dwells  for  those  who  can  wrest  it 
in  a  hateful  taskwork,  that  faculty  of  "detach- 
ment" which  Marcus  Aurelius  learnt  so  long 
ago,  by  means  of  which  the  soul  may  with- 
draw into  an  inaccessible  garden,  and  sing 
while  the  head  bends  above  a  ledger ;  or,  in 
other  words,  the  faculty  of  dreaming  with  one 
side  of  the  brain,  while  calculating  with  the 
other.  Mrs.  Browning's  great  Aurora  Leigh 
helped  me  more  to  the  attainment  of  that 
than  any  book  I  know. 

'  In  their  office,  too,  among  many  other 
great  things,  I  learnt  that  a  man  may  be  a 
good   fellow    and    hate    poetry — possibility 


70  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

undreamed  of  by  sentimental  youth ;  also 
that  Messrs.  Bass  and  Cope  are  not  un- 
worthy of  their  great  reputation ;  and  I 
had  various  nonsense  knocked  out  of  me, 
though  they  never  succeeded  in  persuading 
me  in  that  little  matter  of  the  "  ambrosial 
curls." 

'Through  Samuel  Dale  I  first  came  to 
understand  how  "  whatever  is  "  ca7i  be  "  best," 
and  also  won  a  faith  in  God  which  I  rather 
caught  by  infection  than  gained  by  any 
process  of  his  reasoning.  Of  all  else  I  owe 
to  Samuel,  how  write?     He  knows. 

'  To  a  certain  friend,  mentioned  last  be- 
cause he  is  not  least,  I  owe :  the  sum  of  ten 
pounds,  and  a  loving  companionship,  up 
hill  and  down  dale,  for  which  again  I  have 
no  words  and  no — sovereigns.' 

When  I  first  read  through  these,  I  was 
somewhat  surprised  at  the  omission  of  all 
reference  to  books  which  I  know  marked 
most  striking  periods  in  Narcissus'  spiritual 
life :  Sartor  Resartus,  Thoreau's  Walden, 
for  example,  Mr.  Pater's  Marius  the  Epi- 
curean, and  Browning's  Dramatis  Personce. 
As  1  reflected,  however,  I  came  to  the  con- 


OF    NARCISSUS  71 

elusion  that  such  omission  was  but  justice 
to  his  own  individuality,  for  none  of  these 
books  had  created  an  initiative  in  Narcissus' 
thought,  but  rather  come,  as,  after  all,  I 
suppose  they  come  to  most  of  us,  as  great 
confirming  expressions  of  states  of  mind  at 
which  he  had  already  arrived,  though,  as  it 
were,  but  by  moonlight.  In  them  was  the 
sunrise  bringing  all  into  clear  sight  and  sure 
knowledge. 

It  would  seem,  indeed,  that  the  growth  of 
the  soul  in  the  higher  spirits  of  our  race  is 
analogous  to  the  growth  of  a  child  in  the 
womb,  in  this  respect :  that  in  each  case  the 
whole  gamut  of  earlier  types  is  run  through, 
before  the  ultimate  form  is  attained  in  which 
it  is  decreed  that  the  particular  vital  energy 
shall  culminate.  And,  as  in  the  physical 
world  the  various  '  halts,'  so  to  say,  of  the 
progress  are  illustrated  by  the  co-existence 
and  continual  succession  of  those  earlier 
types  ;  so  in  the  world  of  mind,  at  every 
point  of  spiritual  evolution,  a  man  may 
meet  with  an  historical  individuality  who  is 
a  concrete  embodiment  of  the  particular 
state  to  which  he  has  just  attained.     This,  of 


72  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

course,  was  what  Goethe  meant  when  he 
referred  to  mysticism  as  being  a  frame  of 
mind  which  one  could  experience  all  round 
and  then  leave  behind.  To  quote  Whitman, 
in  another  connection  :  — 

'  We  but  level  that  lift 
To  pass  and  continue  beyond.' 

But  an  individuality  must  'crystallise  out' 
somewhere,  and  its  final  value  will  not  so 
much  depend  on  the  number  of  states  it  has 
passed  through,  as  how  it  has  lived  each  on 
the  way,  with  what  depth  of  conviction  and 
force  of  sincerity.  For  a  modern  young 
man  to  thus  experience  all  round,  and  pass, 
and  continue  beyond  where  such  great  ones 
as  St.  Bernard,  Pascal,  and  Swedenborg, 
have  anchored  their  starry  souls  to  shine 
thence  upon  men  for  all  time,  is  no  un- 
common thing.  It  is  more  the  rule  than  the 
exception :  but  one  would  hardly  say  that 
in  going  further  they  have  gone  higher,  or 
ended  greater.  The  footpath  of  pioneer  in- 
dividualism must  inevitably  become  the 
highway  of  the  race.  Every  American  is 
not  a  Columbus. 

There  are  two  ways  in  which  we  may  live 


OF    NARCISSUS  73 

our  spiritual  progress:  as  critics,  or  poets. 
Most  men  live  theirs  in  that  critical  attitude 
which  refuses  to  commit  itself,  which  tastes 
all,  but  enjoys  none  ;  but  the  greatest  in 
that  earnest,  final,  rooted,  creative,  fashion 
which  is  the  way  of  the  poets.  The  one  is 
as  a  man  who  spends  his  days  passing  from 
place  to  place  in  search  of  a  dwelling  to  his 
mind,  but  dies  at  last  in  an  inn,  having 
known  nought  of  the  settled  peace  of  a 
home  ;  but  the  other,  howsoever  often  he  has 
to  change  his  quarters,  for  howsoever  short 
a  time  he  may  remain  in  any  one  of  his 
resting-places,  makes  of  each  a  home,  with 
roots  that  shoot  in  a  night  to  the  foundations 
of  the  world,  and  blossomed  branches  that 
mingle  with  the  stars. 

Criticism  is  a  good  thing,  but  poetry  is  a 
better.  Indeed,  criticism  properly  is  not ; 
it  is  but  a  process  to  an  end.  We  could 
really  do  without  it  much  better  than  we 
imagine :  for,  after  all,  the  question  is  not  so 
much  how  we  live,  but  do  we  live  ?  Who 
would  not  a  hundred  times  rather  be  a  fruit- 
ful Parsee  than  a  barren  philosopJie  ?  Yes, 
all    lies,  of  course,  in  original  greatness  of 


74  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

soul  ;  and  there  is  really  no  state  of  mind 
which  is  not  like  Hamlet's  pipe — if  we  but 
know  the  '  touch  of  it,'  *  it  will  discourse  most 
eloquent  music' 

Now,  it  was  that  great  sincerity  in  Narcissus 
that  has  always  made  us  take  him  so  seriously. 
And  here  I  would  remark  in  parenthesis, 
that  trivial  surface  insincerities,  such  as  we 
have  had  glimpses  of  in  his  dealings,  do  not 
affect  such  a  great  organic  sincerity  as  I  am 
speaking  of.  They  are  excrescences,  which 
the  great  central  health  will  sooner  or  later 
clear  away.  It  was  because  he  never  held 
an  opinion  to  which  he  was  not,  when  called 
upon,  practically  faithful ;  never  dreamed  a 
dream  without  at  once  setting  about  its 
translation  into  daylight ;  never  professed  a 
creed  for  a  week  without  some  essay  after 
the  realisation  of  its  new  ideal ;  it  was 
because  he  had  the  power  and  the  courage 
to  glow  mightily,  and  to  some  purpose ; 
because  his  life  had  a  fiery  centre,  which  his 
eyes  were  not  afraid  of  revealing — that  I 
speak  of  his  great  sincerity,  a  great  capacity 
for  intense  life.  Shallow  patterers  of  divine 
creeds   were,  therefore,   most    abhorrent   to 


OF    NARCISSUS  75 

him.  'You  must  excuse  me,  sir,'  I  remember 
his  once  saying  to  such  a  one,  '  but  what  are 
you  doing  with  cigarette  and  salutaris  ?  If 
I  held  such  a  belief  as  yours,  I  would  stand 
sandalled,  with  a  rope  round  my  waist, 
before  to-morrow.' 

One  quaint  instance  of  this  earnest  attitude 
in  all  things  occurs  to  me  out  of  his  school- 
days. He  was  a  Divine  Right  man,  a  fiery 
Jacobite,  in  those  days  ;  and,  probably  not 
without  some  absurd  unconfessed  dream  in 
his  heart  that  it  might  somehow  help  the 
dead  old  cause,  he  one  afternoon  fluttered 
the  Hanoverian  hearts — all  the  men  we 
meet  in  street  and  mart  are  Hanoverians, 
of  course — of  our  little  literary  club  by 
solemnly  rising  'to  give  notice'  that  at  the 
following  meeting  he  would  read  a  paper  to 
prove  that  'the  House  of  Hanover  has  no 
right  to  the  English  throne,'  Great  was  the 
excitement  through  the  fortnight  intervening, 
extending  even  to  the  masters ;  and  the 
meeting  was  a  full  one,  and  no  little  stormy. 

Narcissus  rose  with  the  air  of  a  condemned 
Strafford,  and  with  all  his  boyish  armoury 
of  eloquence  and  scorn  fought  over  again 


7^  THE    BOOK -BILLS 

the  long-lost  battle,  hiss  and  groan  falling 
unheeded  into  the  stream  of  his  young  voice. 
But  vain,  vain  !  hard  is  the  Hanoverian  heart 
in  boy,  as  in  man,  and  all  your  glowing 
periods  were  in  vain — vain  as,  your  peroration 
told  us,  'was  the  blood  of  gallant  hearts 
shed  on  Culloden's  field.'  Poor  N.,  you  had 
but  one  timorous  supporter,  even  me,  so  early 
your  fidiis  Achates — but  one  against  so 
many.  Yet  were  you  crestfallen?  Galileo 
with  his  '  E  pur  si  muove,'  Disraeli  with  his 
'  The  time  will  come,'  wore  such  a  mien  as 
yours,  as  we  turned  from  that  well-foughten 
field.  Yes  !  and  you  loved  to  take  in  earnest 
vague  Hanoverian  threats  of  possible  arrest 
for  your  baby-treason,  and,  for  some  time,  I 
know,  you  never  passed  a  policeman  without 
a  dignified  tremor,  as  of  one  who  might  at 
any  moment  find  a  lodging  in  the  Tower. 

But  the  most  serious  of  all  N.'s  'mad' 
enthusiasms  was  that  of  which  the  Reader 
has  already  received  some  hint,  in  the  few 
paragraphs  of  his  own  confessions  above, 
that  which  'had  almost  sent  him  to  the 
Himalayas.' 

It   belongs    to    natures    like    his   always 


OF    NARCISSUS  ^^ 

through  life  to  cherish  a  half  belief  in  their 
old  fairy  tales,  and  a  longing,  however  late 
in  the  day,  to  prove  them  true  at  last.  To 
many  such  the  revelations  with  which 
Madame  Blavatsky,  as  with  some  mystic 
trumpet,  startled  the  Western  world  some 
years  ago,  must  have  come  with  most 
passionate  appeal ;  and  to  Narcissus  they 
came  like  a  love  arisen  from  the  dead. 
Long  before,  he  had  '  supped  full '  of  all 
the  necromantic  excitements  that  poet  or 
romancer  could  give.  Guy  Mannering  had 
introduced  him  to  Lilly  ;  Lytton  and  Haw- 
thorne had  sent  him  searching  in  many  a 
musty  folio  for  Ehxir  Vitae  and  the  Stone. 
Like  Scythrop,  in  *  Nightmare  Abbey,'  he 
had  for  a  long  period  slept  with  horrid 
mysteries  beneath  his  pillow.  But  suddenly 
his  interest  had  faded  :  these  phantoms  fled 
before  a  rationalistic  cock-crow,  and  Eugenius 
Philalethes  and  Robert  Fludd  went  with 
Mejnour  and  Zanoni  into  a  twilight  forget- 
fulness.  There  was  no  hand  to  show  the 
hidden  way  to  the  land  that  might  be,  and 
there  were  hands  beckoning  and  voices 
calling  him  along  the  highway  to  the  land 


78  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

that  is.  So,  dream-light  passing,  he  must, 
perforce,  reconcile  himself  to  daylight,  with 
its  dusty  beam  and  its  narrow  horizons. 

Judge,  then,  with  what  a  leaping  heart 
he  chanced  on  some  newspaper  gossip 
concerning  the  sibyl,  for  it  was  so  that  he 
first  stumbled  across  her  mission.  Ironical, 
indeed,  that  the  so  impossible  '  key '  to  the 
mystery  should  come  by  the  hand  of  'our 
own  correspondent ' ;  but  so  it  was,  and  that 
paragraph  sold  no  small  quantity  of  '  occult ' 
literature  for  the  next  twelve  months.  Mr. 
Sinnett,  doorkeeper  in  the  house  of  Blavat- 
sky,  who,  as  a  precaution  against  the  vision 
of  Bluebeards  that  the  word  Oriental  is  apt 
to  conjure  up  in  Western  minds,  is  always 
dressed  in  the  latest  mode,  and,  so  to  say, 
offers  his  cigar-case  along  with  some  horrid 
mystery — it  was  to  his  prospectus  of  the 
new  gospel,  his  really  delightful  pages,  that 
Narcissus  first  applied.  Then  he  entered 
within  the  gloomier  Egyptian  portals  of  the 
Isz's  itself,  and  from  thence — well,  in  brief, 
he  went  in  for  a  course  of  Redway,  and  little 
that  figured  in  that  gentleman's  thrilling 
announcements  was  long  in  reaching  his 
hands. 


OF    NARCISSUS  79 

At  last  a  day  came  when  his  eye  fell  upon 
a  notice,  couched  in  suitably  mysterious 
terms,  to  the  effect  that  really  earnest  seekers 
after  divine  truth  might,  after  necessary 
probation,  etc.,  join  a  brotherhood  of  such 
— which,  it  was  darkly  hinted,  could  give 
more  than  it  dared  promise.  Up  to 
this  point  Narcissus  had  been  indecisive. 
He  was,  remember,  quite  in  earnest,  and 
to  actually  accept  this  new  evangel  meant 
to  him — well,  as  he  said,  nothing  less  in 
the  end  than  the  Himalayas.  Pending  his 
decision,  however,  he  had  gradually  developed 
a  certain  austerity,  and  experimented  in 
vegetarianism  ;  and  though  he  was,  oddly 
enough,  free  of  amorous  bond  that  might 
have  held  him  to  earth,  yet  he  had  grown 
to  love  it  rather  rootedly  since  the  earlier 
days  when  he  was  a  'seeker.'  Moreover, 
though  he  read  much  of  'The  Path,'  no 
actual  Mejnour  had  yet  been  revealed  to  set 
his  feet  therein.  But  with  this  paragraph 
all  indecision  soon  came  to  an  end.  He 
felt  there  a  clear  call,  to  neglect  which  would 
be  to  have  seen  the  light  and  not  to  have 
followed   it,  ever   for   him    the   most  tragic 


8o  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

error  to  be  made  in  life.  His  natural  pre- 
disposition towards  it  was  too  great  for  him 
to  do  other  than  trust  this  new  revelation  ; 
and  now  he  must  gird  himself  for  'the 
sacrifice  which  truth  always  demands.' 

But,  sacrifice  !  of  what  and  for  what  ?  An 
undefined  social  warmth  he  was  beginning  to 
feel  in  the  world,  some  meretricious  ambition, 
and  a  great  friendship — to  which  in  the  long 
run  would  he  not  be  all  the  truer  by  the 
great  new  power  he  was  to  win  ?  If  hand 
might  no  longer  spring  to  hand,  and  friend- 
ship vie  in  little  daily  acts  of  brotherhood, 
might  he  not,  afar  on  his  mountain-top,  keep 
loving  watch  with  clearer  eyes  upon  the  dear 
life  he  had  left  behind,  and  be  its  vigilant 
fate  ?  Surely  !  and  there  was  nothing  worth 
in  life  that  would  not  gain  by  such  a 
devotion.  All  life's  good  was  of  the  spirit, 
and  to  give  that  a  clearer  shining,  even  in 
one  soul,  must  help  the  rest.  For  if  its  light, 
shining,  as  now,  through  the  grimy  horn- 
lantern  of  the  body,  in  narrow  lanes  and 
along  the  miasmatic  flats  of  the  world,  even 
so  helped  men,  how  much  more  must  it, 
rising  above  that  earthly  fume,  in  a  hidden 


OF    NARCISSUS  8i 

corner  no  longer,  but  in  the  open  heaven,  a 
star  above  the  city.  Sacrifice !  yes,  it  was 
just  such  a  tug  as  a  man  in  the  dark  warmth 
of  morning  sleep  feels  it  to  leave  the  pillow. 
The  mountain-tops  of  morning  gleam  cold 
and  bare  :  but  O !  when,  staff  in  hand,  he  is 
out  amid  the  dew,  the  larks  rising  like 
fountains  above  him,  the  gorse  bright  as  a 
golden  fleece  on  the  hill-side,  and  all  the 
world  a  shining  singing  vision,  what  thought 
of  the  lost  warmth  then  ?  What  warmth 
were  not  well  lost  for  this  keen  exhilarated 
sense  in  every  nerve,  in  limb,  in  eye,  in 
brain?  What  potion  has  sleep  like  this 
crystalline  air  it  almost  takes  one's  breath  to 
drink,  of  such  a  maddening  chastity  is  its 
grot-cool  sparkle?  What  intoxication  can 
she  give  us  for  this  larger  better  rapture? 
So  did  Narcissus,  an  old  Son  of  the  Morning, 
figure  to  himself  the  struggle,  and  pronounce 
'  the  world  well  lost' 

But  I  feel  as  I  write  how  little  I  can  give 
the  Reader  of  all  the  'splendid  purpose  in 
his  eyes '  as  he  made  this  resolve.  Perhaps 
I  am  the  less  able  to  do  so  as— let  me 
confess — I  also  shared  his  dream.  One 
F 


82  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

could  hardly  come  near  him  without,  in 
some  measure,  doing  that  at  all  times ; 
though  with  me  it  could  only  be  a  dream, 
for  I  was  not  free.  I  had  Scriptural  example 
to  plead  '  Therefore  I  cannot  come,'  though 
in  any  case  I  fear  I  should  have  held  back, 
for  I  had  no  such  creative  instinct  for  realisa- 
tion as  Narcissus,  and  have,  I  fear,  dreamed 
many  a  dream  I  had  not  the  courage  even 
to  think  of  clothing  in  flesh  and  blood  ;  like, 
may  I  say,  the  many  who  are  poets  for  all 
save  song — poets  in  chrysalis,  all  those  who 
dream  of  what  some  do,  and  make  the 
audience  of  those  great  articulate  ones.  But 
there  were  one  or  two  trifling  doubts  to  set 
at  rest  before  final  decision.  The  Reader 
has  greatly  misconceived  Narcissus  if  he  has 
deemed  him  one  of  those  simple  souls  whom 
any  quack  can  gull,  and  the  good  faith  of  this 
mysterious  fraternity  was  a  difficult  point  to 
settle.  A  tentative  application  through  the 
address  given,  an  appropriate  nom  de  mystere, 
had  introduced  the  ugly  detail  of  preliminary 
expenses.  Divine  truth  has  to  pay  its 
postage,  its  rent,  its  taxes,  and  so  on  ;  and  the 
'guru'  feeds  not  on  air — although,  of  course, 


OF    NARCISSUS  83 

being  a  'guru,'  he  comes  as  near  it  as  the  flesh 
will  allow :  therefore,  and  surely,  Reader,  a 
guinea  per  annum  is,  after  all,  reasonable 
enough.  Suspect  as  much  as  one  will,  but 
how  gainsay?  Also,  before  the  appHcant 
could  be  admitted  to  noviciate  even,  his 
horoscope  must  be  cast,  and — well,  the  poor 
astrologer  also  needed  bread  and — no !  not 
butter — five  shillings  for  all  his  calculations, 
circles,  and  significations — well,  that  again 
was  only  reasonable.  H'm,  ye-e-s,  but  it 
was  dubious ;  and,  mad  as  we  were,  I  don't 
think  we  ever  got  outside  that  dubiety,  but 
made  up  our  minds,  like  other  converts,  to 
gulp  the  primary  postulate,  and  pay  the 
twenty-six  shillings.  From  the  first,  how- 
ever, Narcissus  had  never  actually  entrusted 
all  his  spiritual  venture  in  this  particular 
craft :  he  saw  the  truth  independent  of  them, 
not  they  alone  held  her  for  him,  though  she 
might  hold  them,  and  they  might  be  that 
one  of  the  many  avenues  for  which  he  had 
waited  to  lead  him  nearer  to  her  heart. 
That  was  all.  His  belief  in  the  new 
illumination  neither  stood  nor  fell  with  them, 
though  his  ardour  for  it  culminated  in  the 


84  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

experience.  One  must  take  the  most  doubt- 
ful experiment  seriously  if  we  are  in  earnest 
for  results. 

So  next  came  the  sacred  name  of  '  the 
Order/  which,  Reader,  I  cannot  tell  thee,  as 
I  have  never  known  it.  Narcissus  being 
bound  by  horrid  oaths  to  whisper  it  to  no 
man,  and  to  burn  at  midnight  the  paper 
which  gave  it  to  his  eyes.  From  this  time, 
also,  we  could  exchange  no  deep  confidences 
of  the  kind  at  all,  for  the  various  MSS.  by 
means  of  which  he  was  to  begin  his  ex- 
cursions into  Urania,  and  which  his  *  guru ' 
sent  from  time  to  time — at  first,  it  must  be 
admitted,  with  a  diligent  frequency — were 
secret  too.  So  several  months  went  by,  and 
my  knowledge  of  his  '  chela-ship '  was  con- 
fined to  what  I  could  notice,  and  such  trifling 
harmless  gossip  as  '  Heard  from  "  guru  "  this 
morning,'  '  Copying  an  old  MS.  last  night,' 
and  so  on.  What  I  could  notice  was  truly, 
as  Lamb  would  say,  '  great  mastery,'  for  lo ! 
Narcissus,  whose  eyes  had  never  missed  a 
maiden  since  he  could  walk,  and  lay  in  wait 
to  wrest  his  tribute  of  glance  and  blush  from 
every  one  that  passed,  lo !  he  had  changed 


OF    NARCISSUS  85 

all  that,  and  Saint  Anthony  in  an  old  master 
looks  not  more  resolutely  'the  other  way' 
than  he,  his  very  thoughts  crushing  his  flesh 
with  invisible  pincers.  No  more  softly- 
scented  missives  lie  upon  his  desk  a-morn- 
ings  ;  and,  instead  of  blowing  out  the  candle 
to  dream  of  Dafifodilia,  he  opens  his  eyes  in 
the  dark  to  defy — the  Dweller  on  the 
Threshold,  if  haply  he  should  indeed  already 
confront  him. 

One  thrilling  piece  of  news  in  regard  to 
the  latter  he  was  unable  to  conceal.  He 
read  it  out  to  me  one  flushed  morning : — 

'  / — have — seen — him — and — am — his — master,'' 

wrote  the  '  guru/  in  answer  to  his  neophyte's 
half  fearful  question.  Fitly  underlined  and 
sufficiently  spaced,  it  was  a  statement  calcu- 
lated to  awe,  if  only  by  its  mendacity.  I 
wonder  if  that  chapter  of  Bulwer's  would 
impress  one  now  as  it  used  to  do  then.  It 
were  better,  perhaps,  not  to  try. 

The  next  news  of  these  mysteries  was 
the  conclusion  of  them.  When  so  darkly 
esoteric  a  body  begins  to  issue  an  extremely 
catchpenny  'organ,'  with  advertisements  of 


86  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

theosophic  '  developers,'  magic  mirrors,  and 
mesmeric  discs,  and  also  advertises  large 
copies  of  the  dread  symbol  of  the  Order, 
*  suitable  for  framing,'  at  five  shillings  plain 
and  seven  and  sixpence  coloured,  it  is,  of 
course,  impossible  to  take  it  seriously,  except 
in  view  of  a  police-court  process,  and  one  is 
evidently  in  the  hands  of  very  poor  bunglers 
indeed.  Such  was  the  new  departure  in 
propaganda  instituted  by  a  little  magazine, 
mean  in  appearance,  as  the  mouthpieces  of 
all  despised  'isms'  seem  to  be,  with  the  first 
number  of  which,  need  one  say,  ended 
Narcissus'  ascent  of  '  The  Path.'  I  don't 
think  he  was  deeply  sad  at  being  disillusion- 
ised. Unconsciously  a  broader  philosophy 
had  slowly  been  undermining  his  position, 
and  all  was  ready  for  the  fall.  It  cost  no 
such  struggle  to  return  to  the  world  as  it 
had  taken  to  leave  it,  for  the  poet  had 
overgrown  the  philosopher,  and  the  open 
mystery  of  the  common  day  was  already 
exercising  an  appeal  beyond  that  of  any 
melodramatic  '  arcana.'  Of  course  the  period 
left  its  mark  upon  him,  but  it  is  most  con- 
spicuous upon  his  bookshelves. 


OF    NARCISSUS  87 


CHAPTER    VII 

THE  CHILDREN   OF   APOLLO 

'He  is  a  true  poet,'  or  *  He  is  a  genuine 
artist,'  are  phrases  which  irritate  one  day 
after  day  in  modern  criticism.  One  had 
thought  that  'poet'  and  'artist'  were  enough; 
but  there  must  be  a  need,  we  regretfully 
suppose,  for  these  re-enforcing  qualifica- 
tions ;  and  there  can  be  but  the  one, 
that  the  false  in  each  kind  do  so  exceed- 
ingly abound,  that  none  can  be  taken  as 
genuine  without  such  special  certificate. 
The  widespread  confusion  with  the  poet 
of  the  rhetorician  and  sentimentalist  in 
verse,  and  again  of  the  mere  rhymer  with- 
out even  rhetoric,  not  to  refer  to  finer 
differentiation  of  error,  is  also  a  fruitful 
source  of  bewilderment.  The  misuse  of 
the  word  has  parallels :  for  instance,  the 
spurious    generic    use   of   the    word    '  man ' 


88  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

for  '  male,'  the  substitution  of  *  artist '  for 
'painter.'  But  here  we  have  only  to  deal 
with  that  one  particular  abuse.  Some  rules 
how  to  know  a  poet  may  conceivably  be  of 
interest,  though  of  no  greater  value. 

Of  course,  the  one  first  and  last  test  is 
his  work,  but  '  how  to  know  poetry '  is 
another  matter,  which  I  do  not  propose 
treating  of  here ;  my  intention  rather  being 
to  dot  down  a  few  personal  characteristics 
— not  so  much  his  '  works '  as  his  '  ways.' 
I  write  as  they  come  into  my  head  ;  and 
to  any  Reader  about  to  cry  out  against 
digression,  let  me  add :  I  write  thinking 
of  Narcissus  ;  for  know  all  men,  friend  or 
Philistine,  if  you  have  yet  to  learn  it,  my 
Narcissus  is  a  poet ! 

First,  as  to  the  great  question  of 'garment- 
ing.' The  superstition  that  the  hat  and  the 
cloak  '  does  it '  has  gone  out  in  mockery, 
but  only  that  the  other  superstition  might 
reien  in  its  stead — that  the  hat  and  cloak 
cannot  do  it.  Because  one  great  poet  dis- 
pensed with  'pontificals,'  and  yet  brought 
the  fire  from  heaven,  henceforward  'ponti- 
ficals' are  humbug,  and  the  wearer  thereof 


OF    NARCISSUS  89 

but  charlatan,  despite — '  the  master  yonder 
in  the  isle.'  Pegasus  must  pack  in  favour 
of  a  British  hunter,  and  even  the  poet  at 
last  wear  the  smug  regimentals  of  medi- 
ocrity and  mammon.  Ye  younger  choir 
especially  have  a  care,  for,  though  you  sing 
with  the  tongues  of  men  and  angels,  and 
wear  not  a  silk  hat,  it  shall  avail  you 
nothing.  Neither  Time,  which  is  Mudie, 
nor  Eternity,  which  is  Fame,  will  know 
you,  and  your  verses  remain  till  doom  in 
an  ironical  editio  princcps,  which  not  even 
the  foolish  bookman  shall  rescue  from  the 
threepenny  box.  It  is  very  unlikely  that 
you  will  escape  as  did  Narcissus,  for  though, 
indeed, 

'  He  swept  a  fine  majestic  sweep 

Of  toga  Tennysonian, 
Wore  strange  soft  hat,  that  such  as  you 
Would  tremble  to  be  known  in,' 

nevertheless,  he  somehow  won  happier  fates, 
on  which,  perhaps,  it  would  be  unbecoming 
in  so  close  a  friend  to  dilate. 

The  'true'  poet  is,  first  of  all,  a  gentle- 
man, usually  modest,  never  arrogant,  and 
only  assertive  when  pushed.  He  does  not 
by    instinct   take   himself  seriously,   as   the 


90  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

'  poet-ape '  doth,  though  if  he  meets  with 
recognition  it  becomes,  of  course,  his  duty 
to  acknowledge  his  faculty,  and  make  good 
Scriptural  use  of  it. 

He  is  probably  least  confident,  however, 
when  praised ;  and  never,  except  in  rare 
moments,  especially  of  eclipse,  has  he  a 
strong  faith  in  the  truth  that  is  in  him. 
Therefore  crush  him,  saith  the  Philistine, 
as  we  crush  the  vine ;  strike  him,  as  one 
strikes  the  lyre.  When  young,  he  imagines 
the  world  to  be  filled  with  one  ambition  ; 
later  on,  he  finds  that  so  indeed  it  is — but 
the  name  thereof  is  not  Poesy.  Strange ! 
sighs  he.  And  if,  when  he  is  seventeen, 
he  writes  a  fluent  song,  and  his  fellow-clerk 
admire  it,  why,  it  is  nothing ;  surely  the 
ledger-man  hath  such  scraps  in  his  poke, 
or  at  least  can  roll  off  better.  '  True  bards 
believe  all  able  to  achieve  what  they  achieve,' 
said  Naddo.  But  lo !  that  ambition  is  a 
word  that  begins  with  pounds  and  ends 
with  pence — like  life,  quoth  the  ledger-man, 
who,  after  all,  had  but  card-scores,  a  tailor's 
account,  and  the  bill  for  his  wife's  confine- 
ment in  his  pocket. 


OF    NARCISSUS  91 

All  through  his  life  he  loves  his  last- 
written  most,  and  no  honey  of  Hybla  is  so 
sweet  as  a  new  rhyme.  Let  no  maid  hope 
to  rival  it  with  her  lips — she  but  interrupts  : 
for  the  travail  of  a  poet  is  even  as  that  of 
his  wife — after  the  pain  comes  that  dear 
joy  of  a  new  thing  born  into  the  world, 
which  doting  sipping  dream  beware  to  break. 
Fifty  repetitions  of  the  new  sweetness,  fifty 
deliberate  rollings  of  it  under  the  tongue, 
is,  I  understand,  the  minimum  duration  of 
such,  before  the  passion  is  worked  off,  and 
the  dream-child  really  breathing  free  of  its 
dream-parent.  I  have  occasionally  come 
upon  Narcissus  about  the  twenty-fifth,  I 
suppose,  and  wondered  at  my  glum  recep- 
tion. '  Poetry  gone  sour,'  he  once  gave  as 
the  reason.  Try  it  not.  Reader,  if,  indeed,  in 
thy  colony  of  beavers  a  poet  really  dwells. 

He  is  a  born  palaeontologist :  that  is,  he 
can  build  up  an  epic  from  a  hint.  And, 
despite  modern  instances,  the  old  rule  ob- 
tains for  him,  he  need  not  be  learned — 
that  is,  not  deeply  or  abundantly,  only  at 
points — superficially,  the  superficial  would 
say.     Well,  yes,  he  has   an  eye  for  know- 


92  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

ing  what  surfaces  mean,  the  secret  of  the 
divining  rod.  Take  it  this  way.  We  want 
an  expression,  say,  of  the  work  of  Keats, 
want  to  be  told  wherein  lies  his  individu- 
ality. You  take  Mr.  Buxton  Forman's  four 
volumes,  and  '  work  at '  Keats !  and,  after 
thirty  nights  and  days,  bring  your  essay. 
On  the  morning  of  the  thirtieth  the  poet 
read  again  the  Grecian  Urn,  and  at  even- 
tide wrote  a  sonnet ;  and  on  the  morning 
of  the  thirty-first,  essay  and  sonnet  are  side 
by  side.  But,  by  the  evening,  your  essay 
is  in  limbo — or  in  type,  all 's  one — while  the 
sonnet  is  singing  in  our  heart,  persistently 
haunting  our  brain.  Some  day  the  poet, 
too,  writes  an  essay,  and  thus  plainly  shows, 
says  the  essayist,  how  little  he  really  knew 
of  the  matter — he  didn't  actually  know  of 
the  so-and-so — and  yet  it  was  his  ignor- 
ance that  gave  us  that  illuminating  line, 
after  all. 

I  doubt  if  one  would  be  on  safe  ground 
in  saying :  Take,  now,  the  subject  of  wine. 
We  all  know  how  abstemious  is  the  poetical 
habit ;  and  yet,  to  read  these  songs,  one 
would  think  'twas  Bacchus'  self  that  wrote, 


OF    NARCISSUS  93 

or  that  Clarence  who  lay  down  to  die  in  a 
butt  of  Malmsey.  Though  the  inference  is 
open  to  question, 

'  I  often  wonder  if  old  Omar  drank 
One  half  the  quantity  he  bragged  in  song. ' 

Doubtless  he  sat  longest  and  drank  least  of 
all  the  topers  of  Naishapur,  and  the  bell 
for  Saki  rang  not  from  his  corner  half  often 
enough  to  please  mine  host  Certainly  the 
longevity  of  some  modern  poets  can  only 
be  accounted  for  by  some  such  supposition 
in  their  case.  The  proposition  is  certainly 
proved  inversely  in  the  case  of  Narcissus,  for 
he  has  not  written  one  vinous  line,  and  yet — 
well,  and  yet !  Furthermore,  it  may  interest 
future  biographers  to  know  that  in  his  cups 
he  was  wont  to  recite  Hamlet's  advice  to 
the  players,  throned  upon  a  tram-car. 

The  'true'  poet  makes  his  magic  with  the 
least  possible  ado  ;  he  and  the  untrue  are  as 
the  angler  who  is  born  to  the  angler  who  is 
made  at  the  tackle-shop.  One  encumbers 
the  small  of  his  back  with  nameless  engines, 
talks  much  of  creels,  hath  a  rod  like  a 
weaver's  beam  ;  he  travels  first  class  to 
some  distant  show-lake  among  the  hills,  and 


94  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

he  toils  all  day  as  the  fishermen  of  old  toiled 
all  night ;  while  Tom,  his  gardener's  son, 
but  a  mile  outside  the  town,  with  a  willow 
wand  and  a  bent  pin,  hath  caught  the  family- 
supper.  So  is  it  with  him  who  is  proverbi- 
ally born  not  made.  His  friends  say  :  *  O, 
you  should  go  to  such-and-such  falls  ;  you  'd 
write  poetry  there,  if  you  like.  We  all  said 
so ' ;  or,  '  What  are  you  doing  in  here  scrib- 
bling? Look  through  the  window  at  the 
moonlight  ;  there  's  poetry  for  you.  Go  out 
into  that  if  you  want  sonnets.'  Of  course,  he 
never  takes  his  friends'  advice  ;  he  has  long 
known  that  they  know  nothing  whatever 
about  it.  He  is  probably  quite  ignorant  of 
metrical  law,  but  one  precept  instinct  taught 
him  from  the  beginning,  and  he  finds  it  ex- 
pressed one  day  in  Wordsworth  (with  a  blessed 
comfort  of  assurance — like  in  this  little,  O, 
may  be  like,  somehow,  in  the  great  thing 
too !) :  '  Poetry  is  emotion  remembered  in 
tranquillity.'  The  wandlike  moments,  he  re- 
members, always  came  to  him  in  haunts  all 
remote  indeed  from  poetry :  a  sudden  touch 
at  his  heart,  and  the  air  grows  rhythmical, 
and  seems  a-ripple  with  dreams  ;  and,  albeit, 


OF    NARCISSUS  95 

in  whatever  room  of  dust  or  must  he  be,  the 
song  will  find  him,  will  throw  her  arms 
about  him,  so  it  seems,  will  close  his  eyes 
with  her  sweet  breath,  that  he  may  open 
them  upon  the  hidden  stars. 

'  Impromptus '  are  the  quackery  of  the 
poetaster.  One  may  take  it  for  granted,  as  a 
general  rule,  that  anything  written  '  on  the 
spot'  is  worthless.  A  certain  young  poet, 
who  could  when  he  liked  do  good  things, 
printed  some  verses,  which  he  declared  in  a 
sub-title  were  'Written  on  the  top  of  Snowdon 
in  a  thunderstorm,'  He  asked  an  opinion, 
and  one  replied  :  '  Written  on  the  top  of 
Snowdon  in  a  thunderstorm.'  The  poet 
was  naturally  angry — and  yet,  what  need  of 
further  criticism  ? 

The  poet,  when  young,  although  as  I  said, 
he  is  not  likely  to  fall  into  the  foolishness  of 
conceit  which  belongs  to  the  poetaster,  is  yet 
too  apt  in  his  zeal  of  dedication  to  talk  much 
of  his  *  art,'  or,  at  least,  think  much  ;  also  to 
disparage  life,  and  to  pronounce  much  gra- 
tuitous absolution  in  the  name  of  Poetry  : — 

Did  Burns  drink  and  wench? — yet  he 
sang ! 


96  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

Did  Coleridge  opiate  and  neglect  his 
family  ? — yet  he  sang  !  ! 

Did  Shelley — well,  whatever  Shelley  did 
of  callous  and  foolish,  the  list  is  long — yet 
he  sang  ! ! ! 

As  years  pass,  however,  he  grows  out  of 
this  stage,  and,  while  regarding  his  art  in  a 
spirit  of  dedication  equally  serious,  and  how 
much  saner,  he  comes  to  realise  that,  after 
all,  art  but  forms  one  integral  part,  however 
great,  of  a  healthy  life,  and  that  for  the 
greatest  artist  there  are  still  duties  in  life 
more  imperative  than  any  art  can  lay  upon 
him.  It  is  a  great  hour  when  he  rises  up  in 
his  resolution  first  to  be  a  man,  in  faith  that, 
if  he  be  such,  the  artist  in  him  will  look 
after  itself — first  a  man,  and  surely  all  the 
greater  artist  for  being  that ;  though  if  not, 
still  a  man.  That  is  the  duty  that  lies  '  next' 
to  all  of  us.  Do  that,  and,  as  we  are  told, 
the  other  will  be  clearer  for  us.  In  that 
hour  that  earlier  form  of  absolution  will 
reverse  itself  on  his  lips  into  one  of  com- 
mination.  Did  they  sing? — yet  they  sinned 
here  and  here ;  and  as  a  man  soweth,  so 
shall  he  reap,  singer  or  sot.     Lo !  his  songs 


OF    NARCISSUS  97 

are  stars  in  heaven,  but  his  sins  are  snakes  in 
hell :  each  shall  bless  and  torment  him  in  turn. 

Pitiable,  indeed,  will  seem  to  him  in  that 
hour  the  cowardice  that  dares  to  cloak  its 
sinning  with  some  fine-spun  theory,  that 
veils  the  gratification  of  its  desires  in  some 
shrill  evangel,  and  wrecks  a  woman's  life  in 
the  names  of — Liberty  and  Song !  Art 
wants  no  such  followers  :  her  bravest  work 
is  done  by  brave  men,  and  not  by  sneaking 
opium-eaters  and  libidinous  '  reformers.' 
We  all  have  sinned,  and  we  all  will  go  on 
sinning,  but  for  God's  sake,  let  us  be  honest 
about  it.  There  are  worse  things  than 
honest  sin.  If,  God  help  you,  you  have 
ruined  a  girl,  do  penance  for  it  through 
your  life ;  pay  your  share ;  but  don't,  what- 
ever you  do,  hope  to  make  up  for  a  bad 
heart  by  a  good  brain.  Foolish  art-patterers 
may  suffer  the  recompense  to  pass,  for  likely 
they  have  all  the  one  and  none  of  the  other ; 
but  good  men  will  care  nothing  about  you 
or  your  work,  so  long  as  bad  trees  refuse  to 
bring  forth  good  fruit,  or  figs  to  grow  on 
thistles. 

We  have  more  to  learn  from  Florentine 
G 


98  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

artists  than  any  '  craft  mystery.'  If  the 
capacity  for  using  the  blossom  while  missing 
the  evil  fruit,  of  which  Mr.  Pater  speaks  in 
the  case  of  Aurelius,  were  only  confined  to 
those  evil-bearing  trees :  alas !  it  is  all 
blossom  with  us  moderns,  good  or  bad  alike, 
and  purity  or  putrescence  are  all  one  to  us, 
so  that  they  shine.  I  suppose  few  regard 
Giotto's  circle  as  his  greatest  work :  would 
that  more  did.  The  lust  of  the  eye,  with 
Gautier  as  high-priest,  is  too  much  with  us. 

The  poet,  too,  who  perhaps  began  with 
the  simple  ambition  of  becoming  a  '  literary 
man,'  soon  finds  how  radically  incapable  of 
ever  being  merely  that  he  is.  Alas !  how 
soon  the  nimbus  fades  from  the  sacred  name 
of  '  author.'  At  one  time  he  had  been  ready 
to  fall  down  and  kiss  the  garment's  hem,  say, 
of — of  a  '  Canterbury '  editor  (this,  of  course, 
when  very,  very  young),  as  of  a  being  from 
another  sphere  ;  and  a  writer  in  The  Fort- 
nightly had  swam  into  his  ken,  trailing 
visible  clouds  of  glory.  But  by  and  by  he 
finds  himself  breathing  with  perfect  com- 
posure in  that  rarefied  air,  and  in  course  of 
time  the  grey  conviction  settles  upon  him 


OF    NARCISSUS  99 

that  these  fabled  people  are  in  no  wise  differ- 
ent from  the  booksellers  and  business  men 
he  had  found  so  sordid  and  dull — no  more 
individual  or  delightful  as  a  race ;  and  he 
speedily  comes  to  the  old  conclusion  he  had 
been  at  a  loss  to  understand  a  year  or  two 
ago,  that,  as  a  rule,  the  people  who  do  not 
write  books  are  infinitely  to  be  preferred  to 
the  people  who  do.  When  he  finds  excep- 
tions, they  occur  as  they  used  to  do  in  shop 
and  office — the  charm  is  all  independent  of 
the  calling  ;  for  just  as  surely  as  a  man  need 
not  grow  mean,  and  hard,  and  dried  up, 
however  prosperous  be  his  iron-foundry,  so 
sure  is  it  that  a  man  will  not  grow  generous, 
rich-minded,  loving,  and  all  that  is  golden 
by  merely  writing  of  such  virtues  at  so  much 
a  column.  The  inherent  insincerity,  more 
or  less,  of  all  literary  work  is  a  fact  of  which 
he  had  not  thought.  I  am  speaking  of  the 
mere  'author,'  the  writer-tradesman,  the 
amateur's  superstition  ;  not  of  men  of  genius, 
who,  despite  cackle,  cannot  disappoint.  If 
they  seem  to  do  so,  it  must  be  that  we  have 
not  come  close  enough  to  know  them.  But 
the  man  of  genius  is  rarer,  perhaps,  in  the 


100         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

ranks  of  authorship  than  anywhere  :  you  are 
far  more  likely  to  find  him  on  the  exchange. 
They  are  as  scarce  as  Caxtons :  London 
possesses  hardly  half-a-dozen  examples. 

Narcissus  enjoyed  the  delight  of  calling 
one  of  these  his  friend,  '  a  certain  aristocratic 
poet  who  loved  all  kinds  of  superiorities,' 
again  to  borrow  from  Mr.  Pater.  He  had 
once  seen  him  afar  off  and  worshipped,  as  it 
is  the  blessedness  of  boys  to  be  able  to  wor- 
ship ;  but  never  could  he  have  dreamed  in 
that  day  of  the  dear  intimacy  that  was  to 
come.  *If  he  could  but  know  me  as  I  am,' 
he  had  sighed  ;  but  that  was  all.  With 
the  almost  childlike  naturalness  which  is  his 
greatest  charm  he  confessed  this  sigh  long 
after,  and  won  that  poet's  heart.  Well  I 
remember  his  bursting  into  our  London 
lodging  late  one  afternoon,  great-eyed  and 
almost  in  tears  for  joy  of  that  first  visit. 
He  had  pre-eminently  the  capacity  which 
most  fine  men  have  of  falling  in  love  with 
men — as  one  may  be  sure  of  a  subtle  great- 
ness in  a  woman  whose  eye  singles  out  a 
woman  to  follow  on  the  stage  at  the  theatre 
— and  certainly,  no  other  phrase  can  express 


OF    NARCISSUS  lOi 

that  state  of  shining,  trembling  exaltation, 
the  passion  of  the  friendships  of  Narcissus. 
And  although  he  was  rich  in  them — rich,  that 
is,  as  one  can  be  said  to  be  rich  in  treasure  so 
rare — saving  one  only,  they  have  never  proved 
that  fairy-gold  which  such  do  often  prove. 
Saving  that  one,  golden  fruit  still  hangs  for 
every  white  cluster  of  wonderful  blossom. 

*  I  thought  you  must  care  for  me  if  you 
could  but  know  me  aright,'  Narcissus  had  said. 

'  Care  for  you  !  Why,  you  beautiful  boy  ! 
you  seem  to  have  dropped  from  the  stars,' 
the  poet  had  replied  in  the  caressing  fashion 
of  an  elder  brother. 

He  had  frankly  fallen  in  love,  too :  for 
Narcissus  has  told  me  that  his  great  charm 
is  a  boyish  naturalness  of  heart,  that  ingen- 
uous gusto  in  living  which  is  one  of  the  sure 
witnesses  to  genius.  This  is  all  the  more 
piquant  because  no  one  would  suspect  it,  as, 
I  suppose,  few  do  ;  probably,  indeed,  a  con- 
sensus would  declare  him  the  last  man  in 
London  of  whom  that  is  true.  No  one 
would  seem  to  take  more  seriously  the  beau 
monde  of  modern  paganism,  with  its  hundred 
gospels   of  La  Nuance;  no  one,  assuredly, 


102         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

were  more  blase  than  he,  with  his  languors  of 
pose,  and  face  of  so  wan  a  flame.  The  Oscar 
Wilde  of  modern  legend  were  not  more  as  a 
dweller  in  Nirvana.  But  Narcissus  main- 
tained that  all  this  was  but  a  disguise  which 
the  conditions  of  his  life  compelled  him  to 
wear,  and  in  wearing  which  he  enjoyed  much 
subtle  subterranean  merriment ;  while  under- 
neath the  real  man  lived,  fresh  as  morning, 
vigorous  as  a  young  sycamore,  wild-hearted 
as  an  eagle,  ever  ready  to  flash  out  the  '  pass- 
word primeval '  to  such  as  alone  could  under- 
stand. How  else  had  he  at  once  taken  the 
stranger  lad  to  his  heart  with  such  a  sun- 
light of  welcome  ?  As  the  maid  every  boy 
must  have  sighed  for  but  so  rarely  found, 
who  makes  not  as  if  his  love  were  a  weari- 
ness which  she  endured,  and  the  kisses  she 
suffered,  cold  as  green  buds,  were  charities, 
but  frankly  glows  to  his  avowal  with  '  I  love 
you,  too,  dear  Jack,'  and  kisses  him  from  the 
first  with  mouth  like  a  June  rose — so  did 
that  blase  poet  cast  away  his  conventional 
Fahrenheit,  and  call  Narcissus  friend  in  their 
first  hour.  Men  of  genius  alone  know  that 
fine  abaitdon  of  soul.     In  such  is  the  poet 


OF    NARCISSUS  103 

confessed  as  unmistakably  as  in  his  verse,  for 
the  one  law  of  his  Hfe  is  that  he  be  an  ele- 
mental, and  the  capacity  for  great  simple 
impressions  is  the  spring  of  his  power.  Let 
him  beware  of  losing  that. 

I  sometimes  wonder  as  I  come  across  the 
last  frivolous  gossip  concerning  that  poet  in 
the  paragraphs  of  the  new  journalism,  or 
meet  his  name  in  some  distinguished  bead- 
roll  in  The  Morning  Post,  whether  Narcissus 
was  not,  after  all,  mistaken  about  him, 
and  whether  he  could  still,  season  after 
season,  go  through  the  same  stale  round  of 
reception,  private  view,  first  night,  and  all  the 
various  drill  of  fashion  and  folly,  if  that 
boy's  heart  were  alive  still.  One  must  believe 
it  once  throbbed  in  him  :  we  have  his  poems 
for  that,  and  a  poem  cannot  lie  ;  but  it  is 
hard  to  think  that  it  could  still  keep  on  its 
young  beating  beneath  such  a  choking 
pressure  of  convention,  and  in  an  air  so 
'  sunken  from  the  healthy  breath  of  morn.' 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  I  have  almost  a 
superstitious  reliance  on  Narcissus'  intuition, 
a  faculty  in  him  which  not  I  alone  have 
marked,  but  which   I   know  was  the  main 


I04         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

secret  of  his  appeal  for  women.  They,  as  the 
natural  possessors  of  the  power,  feel  a  singu- 
lar kinship  with  a  man  who  also  possesses  it, 
a  gift  as  rarely  found  among  his  sex  as  that 
delicacy  which  largely  depends  on  it,  and 
which  is  the  other  sure  clue  to  a  woman's 
love.  She  is  so  little  used,  poor  flower,  to 
be  understood,  and  to  meet  with  other  regard 
than  the  gaze  of  satyrs. 

However,  be  Narcissus'  intuition  at  fault 
or  not  in  the  main,  still  it  was  very  sure  that 
the  boy's  heart  in  that  man  of  the  world  did 
wake  from  its  sleep  for  a  while  at  the  wand- 
like touch  of  his  youth  ;  and  if,  after  all,  as 
may  be,  Narcissus  was  but  a  new  sensation 
in  his  jaded  round,  at  least  he  was  a  healthy 
one.  Nor  did  the  callous  ingratitude  of 
forgetfulness  which  follows  so  swiftly  upon 
mere  sensation  ever  add  another  to  the  sor- 
rows of  my  friend  :  for,  during  the  last  week 
before  he  left  us,  came  a  letter  of  love  and 
cheer  in  that  poet's  wonderful  handwriting — 
handwriting  delicious  with  honeyed  lines, 
each  word  a  flower,  each  letter  rounded  with 
the  firm  soft  curves  of  hawthorn  in  bud,  or 
the  delicate  knobs  of  palm  against  the  sky. 


OF    NARCISSUS  105 


CHAPTER   VIII 

GEORGE    MUNCASTER 

When  I  spoke  of  London's  men  of  genius 
I  referred,  of  course,  to  such  as  are  duly 
accredited,  certificated,  so  to  say,  by  public 
opinion  ;  but  of  those  others  whose  shining 
is  under  the  bushel  of  obscurity,  few  or  many, 
how  can  one  affirm  ?  That  there  are  such, 
any  man  with  any  happy  experience  of  living 
should  be  able  to  testify ;  and  I  should  say, 
for  fear  of  misunderstanding,  that  I  do  not 
use  the  word  genius  in  any  technical  sense, 
not  only  of  men  who  can  do  in  the  great 
triumphal  way,  but  also  of  those  who  can  be 
in  their  quiet,  effective  fashion,  within  their 
own  '  scanty  plot  of  ground '  ;  men  who,  if 
ever  conscious  of  it,  are  content  with  the 
diffusion  of  their  influence  around  the  narrow 
limits   of  their  daily   life,  content  to  bend 


io6         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

their  creative  instincts  on  the  building  and 
beautifying  of  home.  It  is  no  lax  use  of  the 
word  genius  to  apply  it  to  such,  for  unless 
you  profess  the  modern  heresy  that  genius  is 
but  a  multiplied  talent,  a  coral-island  growth, 
that  earns  its  right  to  a  new  name  only 
when  it  has  lifted  its  head  above  the  waters 
of  oblivion,  you  must  agree.  For  '  you  saw 
at  once,'  said  Narcissus,  in  reference  to  that 
poet,  'that  his  writing  was  so  delightful 
because  he  was  more  so.'  His  writings,  in 
fact,  were  but  the  accidental  emanations  of 
his  personality.  He  might  have  given  himself 
out  to  us  in  fugues,  or  canvases,  or  simply, 
like  the  George  Muncaster  of  whom  I  am 
thinking,  in  the  sweet  breath  and  happy 
shining  of  his  home.  Genius  is  a  personal 
quality,  and  if  a  man  has  it,  whatever  his 
hand  touches  will  bear  the  trace  of  his  power, 
an  undying  odour,  an  unfading  radiance. 
When  Rossetti  wrote  'Beauty  like  hers  is 
genius,'  he  was  not  dealing  in  metaphor,  and 
Meissonier  should  have  abolished  for  ever 
the  superstition  of  large  canvases. 

These  desultory  hints  of  the  development 
of  Narcissus  would   certainly   be   more   in- 


OF    NARCISSUS  107 

complete  than  necessity  demands,  if  I  did 
not  try  to  give  the  Reader  some  idea  of  the 
man  of  genius  of  this  unobtrusive  type  to 
whom  I  have  just  alluded.  Samuel  Dale 
used  to  call  himself  '  an  artist  in  life,'  and 
there  could  be  no  truer  general  phrase  to 
describe  George  Muncaster  than  that.  His 
whole  life  possesses  a  singular  unity,  such  as 
is  the  most  satisfying  joy  of  a  fine  work  of 
art,  considering  which  it  never  occurs  to  one 
to  think  of  the  limitation  of  conditions  or 
material.  So  with  his  life,  the  shortness  of 
man's  '  term '  is  never  felt ;  one  could  win  no 
completer  effect  with  eternity  than  he  with 
every  day.  Hurry  and  false  starts  seem 
unknown  in  his  round,  and  his  little  home 
is  a  microcosm  of  the  Golden  Age. 

It  would  even  seem  sometimes  that  he 
has  an  artistic  rule  over  his  '  accidents,'  for 
'  surprises '  have  a  wonderful  knack  of  falling 
into  the  general  plan  of  his  life,  as  though 
but  waited  for.  Our  first  meeting  with  him 
was  a  singular  instance  of  this.  I  say  *  our,' 
for  Narcissus  and  I  chanced  to  be  walking  a 
holiday  together  at  the  time.  It  fell  on  this 
wise.    At  Tewkesbury  it  was  we  had  arrived, 


io8         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

one  dull  September  evening,  just  in  time  to 
escape  a  wetting  from  a  grey  drizzle  then 
imminent  ;  and  in  no  very  buoyant  spirits 
we  turned  into  TJic  Swan  Inn.  A  more 
dismal  coffee-room  for  a  dismal  evening 
could  hardly  be — gloomy,  vast,  and  thinly 
furnished.  We  entered  sulkily,  seeming  the 
only  occupants  of  the  sepulchre.  However, 
there  was  a  small  book  on  the  table  facing 
the  door,  sufficiently  modern  in  appearance 
to  catch  one's  eye  and  arouse  a  faint  ripple 
of  interest.  *  A  Canterbury,'  we  cried.  '  And 
a  Whitman,  more 's  the  wonder,'  cried  Nar- 
cissus, who  had  snatched  it  up.  '  Why, 
some  one's  had  the  sense,  too,  to  cut  out 
the  abominable  portrait.  I  wonder  whose 
it  is.  The  owner  must  evidently  have  some 
right  feeling.' 

Then,  before  there  was  time  for  further 
exclamatory  compliment  of  the  unknown, 
we  were  half-startled  by  the  turning  round 
of  an  arm-chair  at  the  far  end  of  the  room, 
and  were  aware  of  a  manly  voice  of  exquisite 
quality  asking,  *  Do  you  know  Whitman  ? ' 

And  moving  towards  the  speaker,  we  were 
for  the  first  time  face  to  face  with  the  strong 


OF    NARCISSUS  109 

and    gentle   George   Muncaster,  who    since 
stands    in    our    little    gallery   of    types    as 
Whitman's  Camarado  and  Divine  Husband 
made  flesh.      I  wish,  Reader,  that  I   could 
make  you  see  his  face  ;  but  at  best  I  have 
little   faith   in    pen    portraits.       It    is    com- 
paratively easy  to  write  a  graphic  description 
of  a  face ;    but  when  it  has  been  read,  has 
the  reader  realised  the  face  ?     I  doubt  it,  and 
am  inclined  to  believe  that  three  different 
readers  will  carry  away  three  different  im- 
pressions even  from  a  really  brilliant  portrait. 
Laborious  realism  may,  at  least,  I  think,  be 
admitted  as  hopeless.     The  only  chance  is 
in  a  Meredithian  lightning-flash,  and  those 
fly  but  from  one  or  two  bows.     I  wonder  if 
an  image  will  help  at  all  here.     Think  on  a 
pebbly  stream,  on  a  brisk,  bright  morning  ; 
dwell  on  the  soft,  shining  lines  of  its  flowing  ; 
and    then    recall    the    tonic    influence,   the 
sensation   of  grip,  which   the   pebbles   give 
it.     Dip  your  hand  into  it  again  in  fancy  ; 
realise  how  chaste  it  is,  and  then  again  think 
how   bright   and    good    it   is.      And  if  you 
realise  these   impressions  as   they  come  to 
me,   you   will    have    gained    some   idea   of 


no         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

George  Muncaster's  face — the  essential  spirit 
of  it,  I  mean,  ever  so  much  more  important 
than  the  mere  features.  Such,  at  least, 
seemed  the  meaning  of  his  face  even  in 
the  first  moment  of  our  intercourse  that 
September  dusk,  and  so  it  has  never  ceased 
to  come  upon  us  even  until  now. 

And  what  a  night  that  was  !  what  a  talk  ! 
How  soon  did  we  find  each  other  out !  Long 
before  the  maid  knocked  at  the  door,  and 
hinted  by  the  delicate  insinuation  of  a  sup- 
posed ring  that  there  was  '  a  budding 
morrow '  in  the  air.  But  our  passionate 
generosity  of  soul  was  running  in  too  strong 
a  tide  just  then  to  be  stemmed  by  any  such 
interference;  it  could  but  be  diverted,  and 
Muncaster's  bedroom  served  us  as  well 
wherein  to  squat  in  one  of  those  close,  rapt 
circles  of  talk  such  as,  I  think,  after  all, 
men  who  love  poetry  can  alone  know — men, 
anyhow,  with  a  poetry. 

Bed,  that  had  for  some  time  been  calling 
us,  unheeded  as  Juliet's  nurse,  had  at  last  to 
be  obeyed  ;  but  how  grudgingly  ;  and  how 
eagerly  we  sprang  from  it  at  no  late  hour  in 
the  morning,  at  the  first  thought  of  the  sweet 


OF    NARCISSUS  in 

new  thing  that  had  come  into  the  world — 
like  children  who,  half  in  a  doze  before 
waking,  suddenly  remember  last  night's  new 
wonder  of  a  toy,  to  awake  in  an  instant,  and 
scramble  into  clothes  to  look  at  it  again. 
Thus,  like  children  we  rose  ;  but  it  was  shy 
as  lovers  we  met  at  the  breakfast-table,  as 
lovers  shy  after  last  night's  kissing.  (You 
may  not  have  loved  a  fellow-man  in  this 
way,  Reader,  but  we  are,  any  one  of  us,  as 
good  men  as  you  ;  so  keep  your  eyebrows 
down,  I  beseech  you.) 

One  most  winsome  trait  of  our  new  friend 
was  soon  apparent — as,  having,  to  our  sorrow, 
to  part  at  the  inn  door  right  and  left,  we 
talked  of  meeting  again  at  one  or  the  other's 
home  :  a  delicate  disinclination  to  irreverently 
*  make  sure '  of  the  new  joy  ;  a  '  listening 
fear,'  as  though  of  a  presiding  good  spirit 
that  might  revoke  his  gift  if  one  stretched 
out  towards  it  with  too  greedy  hands.  'Rather 
let  us  part  and  say  nought.  You  know  where 
a  letter  will  find  me.  If  our  last  night  was  a 
real  thing,  we  shall  meet  again,  never  fear.' 
With  some  such  words  as  those  it  was  that 
he  bade  us  good-bye. 


112         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

Of  course,  letters  found  all  three  of  us 
before  a  fortnight  had  gone  by,  and  in  but  a 
short  time  we  found  his  home.  There  it  is 
that  George  should  be  seen.  Away  he  is 
full  of  precious  light,  but  home  is  his  setting. 
To  Narcissus,  who  found  it  in  that  green 
period  when  all  youngsters  take  vehement 
vows  of  celibacy,  and  talk  much  of  'free 
love,'  all  ignorant,  one  is  in  charity  persuaded, 
of  what  they  quite  mean,  that  home  was 
certainly  as  great  and  lasting  a  revelation  as 
the  first  hour  of  '  Poetry's  divine  first  finger- 
touch.'  It  was  not  that  his  own  home-life 
had  been  unhappy,  for  it  was  the  reverse, 
and  rich  indeed  in  great  and  sweet  influ- 
ences ;  but  it  was  rather,  I  think,  that  the 
ideal  of  a  home  is  not  so  easily  to  be 
reached  from  that  home  in  which  one  is  a 
child,  where  one  is  too  apt  to  miss  the  whole 
in  consideration  of  one's  own  part  in  it,  as 
from  another  on  which  we  can  look  from 
the  outside. 

Our  parents,  even  to  the  end,  partake  too 
much  of  the  nature  of  mythology  ;  it  always 
needs  an  effort  to  imagine  them  beings  with 
quite  the  same  needs  and  dreams  as  our- 


OF    NARCISSUS  113 

selves.  We  rarely  get  a  glimpse  of  their 
poetry,  for  the  very  reason  that  we  ourselves 
are  factors  in  it,  and  are,  therefore,  too  apt 
to  dwell  on  the  less  happy  details  of  the 
domestic  life,  details  which  one  ray  of  their 
poetry  would  transfigure  as  the  sun  trans- 
figures the  motes  in  his  beam.  Thus,  in  that 
green  age  I  spoke  of,  one's  sickly  vision  can 
but  see  the  dusty,  world-worn  side  of  domes- 
ticity, the  petty  daily  cares  of  living,  the 
machinery,  so  to  say,  of  '  house  and  home.' 
But  when  one  stands  in  another  home, 
where  these  are  necessarily  unseen  by  us, 
stands  with  the  young  husband,  the  poetry- 
maker,  how  different  it  all  seems.  One  sees 
the  creation  bloom  upon  it ;  one  ceases  to 
blaspheme,  and  learns  to  bless.  Later,  when 
at  length  one  understands  why  it  is  sweeter 
to  say  '  wife '  than  '  sweetheart,'  how  even 
one  may  be  reconciled  to  calling  one's 
Daffodilia  'little  mother' — because  of  the 
children,  you  know ;  it  would  never  do  for 
them  to  say  Daffodilia — then  he  will  under- 
stand too  how  those  petty  details,  formerly 
so  'banal'  are,  after  all,  but  notes  in  the 
music,  and  what  poetry  can  flicker,  like  its 
H 


114         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

own    blue    flame,    around    even    the    joint 
purchase  of  a  frying-pan. 

That  Narcissus  ever  understood  this  great 
old  poetry  he  owes  to  George  Muncaster. 
In  the  very  silence  of  his  home  one  hears  a 
singing — 'There  lies  the  happiest  land.'  It 
was  one  of  his  own  quaint  touches  that  the 
first  night  we  found  his  nest,  after  the  maid 
had  given  us  admission,  there  should  be  no 
one  to  welcome  us  into  the  bright  little 
parlour  but  a  wee  boy  of  four,  standing  in 
the  doorway  like  a  robin  that  has  hopped  on 
to  one's  window-sill.  But  with  what  a  dear 
grace  did  the  little  chap  hold  out  his  hand 
and  bid  us  good  evening,  and  turn  his  little 
morsel  of  a  bird's  tongue  round  our  names  ; 
to  be  backed  at  once  by  a  ring  of  laughter 
from  the  hidden  'prompter'  thereupon  re- 
vealed. O  happy,  happy  home !  may  God 
for  ever  smile  upon  you !  There  should  be 
a  special  grace  for  happy  homes.  George's 
set  us  'collecting'  such,  with  results  un- 
dreamed of  by  youthful  cynic.  Take  courage. 
Reader,  if  haply  you  stand  with  hesitating 
toe  above  the  fatal  plunge.  Fear  not,  you 
can  swim  if  you  will.     Of  course,  you  must 


OF    NARCISSUS  115 

take  care  that  your  joint  poetry-maker  be 
such  a  one  as  George's.  One  must  not  seem 
to  forget  the  loving  wife  who  made  such 
dreaming  as  his  possible.  He  did  not ;  and, 
indeed,  had  you  told  him  of  his  happiness, 
he  would  but  have  turned  to  her  with  a 
smile  that  said,  '  All  of  thee,  my  love ' ; 
while,  did  one  ask  of  this  and  that,  how 
quickly  '  Yes !  that  was  George's  idea,' 
laughed  along  her  lips. 

While  we  sat  talking  that  first  evening, 
there  suddenly  came  three  cries,  as  of  three 
little  heads  straining  out  of  a  nest,  for 
'  Father ' ;  and  obedient,  with  a  laugh,  he  left 
us.  This,  we  soon  learnt,  was  a  part  of 
the  sweet  evening  ritual  of  home.  After 
mother's  more  practical  service  had  been 
rendered  the  little  ones,  and  they  were  cosily 
'  tucked  in,'  then  came  '  father's  turn,'  which 
consisted  of  his  sitting  by  their  bedside — 
Owen  and  Geoffrey  on  one  hand,  and  little 
queen  Phyllis,  maidenlike  in  solitary  cot, 
on  the  other — and  crooning  to  them  a  little 
evening  song.  In  the  dark,  too,  I  should 
say,  for  it  was  one  of  his  wise  provisions 
that  they  should  be  saved  from  ever  fearing 


ii6         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

that ;  and  that,  whenever  they  awoke  to  find 
it  round  them  in  the  middle  of  the  night,  it 
should  bring  them  no  other  association  but 
*  father's  voice.' 

A  quaint  recitative  of  his  own,  which  he 
generally  contrived  to  vary  each  night,  was 
the  song,  a  loving  croon  of  sleep  and  rest. 
The  brotherhood  of  rest,  one  might  name 
his  theme  for  grown-up  folk ;  as  in  the 
morning,  we  afterwards  learnt,  he  is  wont  to 
sing  them  another  little  song  of  the  brother- 
hood of  work ;  the  aim  of  his  whole  beautiful 
effort  for  them  being  to  fill  their  hearts  with 
a  sense  of  the  brotherhood  of  all  living  things 
— flowers,  butterflies,  bees  and  birds,  the 
milk-boy,  the  policeman,  the  man  at  the 
crossing,  the  grocer's  pony,  all  within  the 
circle  of  their  little  lives,  as  living  and 
working  in  one  great  cainavaderie.  Some- 
times he  would  extemporise  a  little  rhyme 
for  them,  filling  it  out  with  his  clear,  happy 
voice,  and  that  tender  pantomime  that  comes 
so  naturally  to  a  man  who  not  merely  loves 
children — for  who  is  there  that  does  not  ? — 
but  one  born  with  the  instinct  for  intercourse 
with  them.     To  those  not  so  born  it  is  as 


OF    NARCISSUS  117 

difficult  to  enter  into  the  life  and  prattle  of 
birds.  I  have  once  or  twice  crept  outside 
the  bedroom  door  when  neither  children  nor 
George  thought  of  eavesdroppers,  and  the 
following  little  songs  are  impressions  from 
memory  of  his.  You  must  imagine  them 
chanted  by  a  voice  full  of  the  infinite  tender- 
ness of  fatherhood,  and  even  then  you  will 
but  dimly  realise  the  music  they  have  as  he 
sings  them.  I  run  the  risk  of  his  forgiving 
my  printing  them  here  : — 

MORNING  SONG. 

Morning  comes  to  little  eyes, 
Wakens  birds  and  butterflies, 
Bids  the  flower  uplift  his  head, 
Calls  the  whole  round  world  from  bed. 
Up  jump  Geoffrey  ! 
Up  jump  Owen  !  ! 
Then  up  jump  Phyllis  !  !  ! 
And  father's  going  ! 

EVENING   SONG. 

The  sun  is  weary,  for  he  ran 

So  far  and  fast  to-day  ; 
The  birds  are  weary,  for  who  sang 

So  many  songs  as  they  ? 
The  bees  and  butterflies  at  last 

Are  tired  out ;  for  just  think,  too, 
How  many  gardens  through  the  day 

Their  little  wings  have  fluttered  through. 


iiS         THE   BOOK-BILLS 

And  so,  as  all  tired  people  do, 
They  've  gone  to  lay  their  sleepy  heads 
Deep,  deep  in  warm  and  happy  beds. 
The  sun  has  shut  his  golden  eye. 
And  gone  to  sleep  beneath  the  sky ; 
The  birds,  and  butterflies,  and  bees 
Have  all  crept  into  flowers  and  trees, 
And  all  lie  quiet,  still  as  mice, 
Till  morning  comes,  like  father's  voice. 
So  Phyllis,  Owen,  Geoffrey,  you 
Must  sleep  away  till  morning  too  ; 
Close  little  eyes,  lie  down  little  heads, 
And  sleep,  sleep,  sleep  in  happy  beds. 

As  the  Reader  has  not  been  afflicted  with 
a  great  deal  of  verse  in  these  pages,  I  shall 
also  venture  to  copy  here  another  little  song 
which,  as  his  brains  have  grown  older, 
George  has  been  fond  of  singing  to  them 
at  bedtime,  and  with  which  the  Reader  is 
not  likely  to  have  enjoyed  a  previous 
acquaintance : — 

REST.^ 

When  the  Sun  and  the  Golden  Day 
Hand  in  hand  are  gone  away, 
At  your  door  shall  Sleep  and  Night 
Come  and  knock  in  the  fair  twilight ; 

Let  them  in,  twin  travellers  blest ; 

Each  shall  be  an  honoured  guest, 

And  give  you  rest. 

1  From  a  tiny  privately-printed  volume  of  deliciously  original 
lyrics  by  Mr.  R.  K.  Leather,  since  republished  by  Mr.  Fisher 
Unwin,  1890,  and  at  present  published  by  Mr.  John  Lane. 


OF    NARCISSUS  119 

They  shall  tell  of  the  stars  and  moon, 

And  their  lips  shall  move  to  a  glad  sweet  tune, 

Till  upon  your  cool,  white  bed 

Fall  at  last  your  nodding  head ; 

Then  in  dreamland  fair  and  blest, 
Farther  off  than  East  and  West, 
They  give  you  rest. 

Night  and  Sleep,  that  goodly  twain, 

Tho'  they  go,  shall  come  again  ; 

When  your  work  and  play  are  done, 

And  the  Sun  and  Day  are  gone 

Hand  in  hand  thro'  the  scarlet  West, 
Each  shall  come,  an  honoured  guest, 
And  bring  you  rest. 

Watching  at  your  window-sill, 
If  upon  the  Eastern  hill 
Sun  and  Day  come  back  no  more. 
They  shall  lead  you  from  the  door 

To  their  kingdom  calm  and  blest, 

Farther  off  than  East  or  West, 

And  give  you  rest. 


Arriving  down  to  breakfast  earlier  than 
expected  next  morning,  we  discovered  George 
busy  at  some  more  of  his  loving  ingenuity. 
He  half  blushed  in  his  shy  way,  but  went  on 
writing  in  this  wise,  with  chalk,  upon  a  small 
blackboard  :  '  Thursday — Thoi's-day—Jack 
the  Giant  Killer's  day.'  Then,  in  one  corner 
of  the  board,  a  sun  was  rising  with  a  merry 
face  and  flaming  locks,  and  beneath  him  was 


I20         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

written,  '  PJiccbus- Apollo ' ;  while  in  the  other 
corner  was  a  setting  moon, 'Z^^  Cynthia! 
There  were  other  quaint  matters,  too,  though 
they  have  escaped  my  memory ;  but  these 
hints  are  sufficient  to  indicate  George's 
morning  occupation.  Thus  he  endeavoured 
to  implant  in  the  young  minds  he  felt  so 
sacred  a  trust  an  ever-present  impression  of 
the  full  significance  of  life  in  every  one  of 
its  details.  The  days  of  the  week  should 
mean  for  them  what  they  did  mean,  should 
come  with  a  veritable  personality,  such  as 
the  sun  and  the  moon  gained  for  them 
by  thus  having  actual  names,  like  friends 
and  playfellows.  This  Thor's-day  was  an 
especially  great  day  for  them  ;  for,  in  the 
evening,  when  George  had  returned  from 
business,  and  there  was  yet  an  hour  to 
bedtime,  they  would  come  round  him  to 
hear  one  of  the  adventures  of  the  great 
Thor  —  adventures  which  he  had  already 
contrived,  he  laughingly  told  us,  to  go  on 
spinning  out  of  the  Edda  through  no  less 
than  the  Thursdays  of  two  years.  Certainly 
his  ingenuity  of  economy  with  his  materials 
was  no  little  marvel,  and  he  confessed  to 


OF    NARCISSUS  121 

often  being  at  his  wits'  end.  For  Thursday- 
night  was  not  alone  starred  with  stories  ; 
every  night  there  was  one  to  tell ;  some- 
times an  incident  of  his  day  in  town,  which 
he  would  dress  up  with  the  imaginative 
instinct  of  a  born  teller  of  fairy-tales.  He 
had  a  knack,  too,  of  spreading  one  story 
over  several  days  which  would  be  invaluable 
to  a  serial  writer.  I  remember  one  simple 
instance  of  his  device. 

He  sat  in  one  of  those  great  cane  nursing 
chairs,  Phyllis  on  one  knee,  Owen  on  the 
other,  and  Geoffrey  perched  in  the  hollow 
space  in  the  back  of  the  chair,  leaning 
over  his  shoulder,  all  as  solemn  as  a  court 
awaiting  judgment,  George  begins  with 
a  preliminary  glance  behind  at  Geoffrey : 
*  Happy  there,  my  boy  ?  That 's  right. 
Well,  there  was  once  a  beautiful  garden.' 

'Yes-s-s-s,'  go  the  three  solemn  young 
heads, 

'And  it  was  full  of  the  most  wonderful 
things,' 

'  Yes-s-s-s.' 

'  Great  trees,  so  green,  for  the  birds  to 
hide  and  sing  in  ;  and   flowers  so  fair  and 


122         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

sweet  that  the  bees  said  that,  in  all  their 
flying  hither  and  thither,  they  had  never 
yet  found  any  so  full  of  honey  in  all  the 
world.  And  the  birds,  too,  what  songs 
they  knew  ;  and  the  butterflies,  were  there 
ever  any  so  bright  and  many-coloured  ? ' 
etc.,  etc. 

'  But  the  most  wonderful  thing  about  the 
garden  was  that  everything  in  it  had  a 
wonderful  story  to  tell.' 

'  Yes-s-s  s.' 

'  The  birds,  and  bees,  and  butterflies,  even 
the  trees  and  flowers,  each  knew  a  wonderful 
fairy-tale.' 

'  Oh-h-h-h.' 

'  But  of  all  in  the  garden  the  grasshopper 
knew  the  most.  He  had  been  a  great 
traveller,  for  he  had  such  long  legs.' 

Again  a  still  deeper  murmur  of  breathless 
interest. 

'Now,  would  you  like  to  hear  what  the 
grasshopper  had  to  tell  ? ' 

*  Oh,  yes-s-s-s.' 

'  Well,  you  shall — to-morrow  night ! ' 

So  off  his  knees  they  went,  as  he  rose 
with  a  merry,  loving  laugh,  and  kissed  away 


OF    NARCISSUS  123 

the  long  sighs  of  disappointment,  and  sent 
them  to  bed,  agog  for  all  the  morrow's  night 
should  reveal. 

Need  one  say  that  the  children  were  not 
the  only  disappointed  listeners?  Besides, 
they  have  long  since  known  all  the  wonderful 
tale,  whereas  one  of  the  poorer  grown-up 
still  wonders  wistfully  what  that  grasshopper 
who  was  so  great  a  traveller,  and  had  such 
long  legs,  had  to  tell. 

But  I  had  better  cease.  Were  I  sure  that 
the  Reader  was  seeing  what  I  am  seeing, 
hearing  as  I,  I  should  not  fear ;  but  how  can 
I  be  sure  of  that?  Had  I  the  pen  which 
that  same  George  will  persist  in  keeping  for 
his  letters,  I  should  venture  to  delight  the 
Reader  with  more  of  his  story.  One  under- 
hand hope  of  mine,  however,  for  these  poor 
hints  is,  that  they  may  by  their  very  imper- 
fection arouse  him  to  give  the  world  'the 
true  story'  of  a  happy  home.  Narcissus 
repeatedly  threatened  that,  if  he  did  not 
take  pen  in  hand,  he  would  some  day  '  make 
copy'  of  him;  and  now  I  have  done  it 
instead.  Moreover,  I  shall  further  presume 
on   his   forbearance    by   concluding   with   a 


124         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

quotation  from  one  of  his  letters  that  came 
to  me  but  a  few  months  back  : — 

*  You  know  how  deeply  exercised  the  little 
ones  are  on  the  subject  of  death,  and  how  I 
had  answered  their  curiosity  by  the  story 
that  after  death  all  things  turn  into  flowers. 
Well,  what  should  startle  the  wife's  ears  the 
other  day  but  "  Mother,  I  wish  you  would 
die."  "O  why,  my  dear?"  "Because  I 
should  so  like  to  water  you ! "  was  the 
delicious  explanation.  The  theory  has, 
moreover,  been  called  to  stand  at  the  bar  of 
experience,  for  a  week  or  two  ago  one  of 
Phyllis'  goldfish  died.  There  were  tears  at 
first,  of  course,  but  they  suddenly  dried  up 
as  Geoffrey,  in  his  reflective  way,  wondered 
"  what  flower  it  would  come  to."  Here  was 
a  dilemma.  One  had  never  thought  of  such 
contingencies.  But,  of  course,  it  was  soon 
solved.  "  What  flower  would  you  like  it  to 
be,  my  boy  ? "  I  asked.  "  A  poppy  ! "  he 
answered;  and  after  consultation,  "a  poppy!" 
agreed  the  others.  So  a  poppy  it  is  to  be. 
A  visit  to  the  seedsman's  procured  the 
necessary  surreptitious  poppy  seed  ;  and  so 
now  poor  Sir  Goldfish  sleeps  with  the  seed 


OF    NARCISSUS  125 

of  sleep  in  his  mouth,  and  the  children  watch 
his  grave  day  by  day,  breathless  for  his 
resplendent  resurrection.  Will  you  write  us 
an  epitaph?' 

Ariel  forgive  me  !     Here  is  what  I  sent : 

'  Five  inches  deep  Sir  Goldfish  lies  ; 

Here  last  September  was  he  laid  ; 
Poppies  these,  that  were  his  eyes, 

Offish-bones  are  these  blue-bells  made  ; 
His  fins  of  gold  that  to  and  fro 
Waved  and  waved  so  long  ago, 
Still  as  petals  wave  and  wave 
To  and  fro  above  his  grave. 
Hearken,  too  !  for  so  his  knell 
Tolls  all  day  each  tiny  bell.' 


126         THE    BOOK-BILLS 


CHAPTER   LX 

THAT  THIRTEENTH  MAID 

'  Who  chooseth  me  must  give  and  hazard  all  he  hath. ' — 

Merchant  of  Venice. 

It  occurs  to  me  here  to  wonder  whether 
there  can  be  any  reader  ungrateful  enough 
to  ask  with  grumbling  voice,  '  What  of  the 
book-bills?  The  head-line  has  been  the 
sole  mention  of  them  now  for  many  pages ; 
and  in  the  last  chapter,  where  a  book  was 
referred  to,  the  writer  was  perverse  enough 
to  choose  one  that  never  belonged  to  Nar- 
cissus at  all.'  To  which  I  would  venture  to 
make  humble  rejoinder  —  Well,  Goodman 
Reader,  and  what  did  you  expect  ?  Was  it 
accounts,  with  all  their  thrilling  details,  with 
totals,  '  less  discount,'  and  facsimiles  of  the 
receipt  stamps?  Take  another  look  at  our 
first  chapter.      I   promised    nothing   of  the 


OF    NARCISSUS  127 

sort  there,  I  am  sure.  I  promised  simply  to 
attempt  for  you  the  delineation  of  a  per- 
sonality which  has  had  for  all  who  came 
into  contact  with  it  enduring  charm,  in  hope 
that,  though  at  second-hand,  you  might  have 
some  pleasure  of  it  also ;  and  I  proposed  to 
do  this  mainly  from  the  hints  of  documents 
which  really  are  more  significant  than  any 
letters  or  other  writings  could  be,  for  the 
reason  that  they  are  of  necessity  so  un- 
conscious. I  certainly  had  no  intention  of 
burdening  you  with  the  original  data,  any 
more  than,  should  you  accept  the  offer  I 
made,  also  in  that  chapter,  and  entrust  me 
with  your  private  ledger  for  biographical 
purposes,  I  would  think  of  printing  it  in 
extenso,  and  calling  it  a  biography ;  though  I 
should  feel  justified,  after  the  varied  story 
had  been  deduced  and  written  out,  in  calling 
the  product,  metaphorical  wise,  '  The  private 
ledger  of  Johannes  Browne,  Esquire' — a 
title  which,  by  the  way,  is  copyright  and 
duly  '  entered.'  Such  was  my  attempt,  and 
I  maintain  that  I  have  so  far  kept  my  word. 
Because  whole  shelves  have  been  disposed 
of  in  a  line,  and  a  ninepenny  '  Canterbury ' 


128         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

has  rustled  out  into  pages,  you  have  no  right 
to  complain,  for  that  is  but  the  fashion  of 
life,  as  I  have  endeavoured  to  show.  And 
let  me  say  in  passing  that  that  said  copy  of 
Mr,  Rhys's  Whitman,  though  it  could  not 
manifestly  appear  in  his  book-bills,  does  at 
the  present  moment  rest  upon  his  shelf — '  a 
moment's  monument' 

Perhaps  it  would  be  well,  before  proceed- 
ing with  this  present  '  place  in  the  story,' 
to  set  out  with  a  statement  of  the  various 
'  authorities '  for  it ;  as,  all  this  being  veri- 
table history,  perhaps  one  should.  But  then, 
Reader,  here  again  I  should  have  to  cata- 
logue quite  a  small  library.  However,  I 
will  enumerate  a  few  of  the  more  significant 
ones. 

'  Swinburne's  Tristram  of  Lyonesse,  9/-, 
less  dis.,  6/9.' 

All  that  this  great  poem  of  'springtide 
passion  with  its  fire  and  flowers'  meant  to 
Narcissus  and  his  *  Thirteenth  Maid '  in  the 
morning  of  their  love,  those  that  have  loved 
too  will  hardly  need  telling,  while  those  who 
have  not  could  never  understand,  though  I 
spake  with  the  tongue  of  the  poet  himself 


OF    NARCISSUS  129 

In  this  particular  copy,  which,  I  need  hardly 
say,  does  not  rest  upon  N.'s  shelves,  but  on 
another  in  a  sweet  little  bedchamber,  there 
is  a  tender  inscription  and  a  sonnet  which 
aimed  at  acknowledging  how  the  hearts  of 
those  young  lovers  had  gone  out  to  that 
poet  'with  mouth  of  gold  and  morning  in 
his  eyes.'  The  latter  I  have  begged  leave 
to  copy  here  : — 

'  Dear  Heart,  what  thing  may  symbolise  for  us 
A  love  like  ours ;  what  gift,  whate'er  it  be. 
Hold  more  significance  'twixt  thee  and  me 

Than  paltry  words  a  truth  miraculous, 

Or  the  poor  signs  that  in  astronomy 
Tell  giant  splendours  in  their  gleaming  might? 
Yet  love  would  still  give  such,  as  in  delight 

To  mock  their  impotence — so  this  for  thee. 

'  This  book  for  thee  ;  our  sweetest  honeycomb 
Of  lovesome  thought  and  passion-hearted  rhyme, 

Builded  of  gold,  and  kisses,  and  desire. 
By  that  wild  poet  whom  so  many  a  time 
Our  hungering  lips  have  blessed,  until  a  fire 
Burnt  speech  up,  and  the  wordless  hour  had  come.' 

'  Meredith's  Richard  Feveirl,  6/-,  less  dis., 

4/6.' 

Narcissus    was    never    weary    of   reading 
those  two   wonderful  chapters  where  Lucy 
and    Richard    meet,    and    he    used    to    say 
I 


130         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

that  some  day  he  would  beg  leave  from 
Mr.  Meredith  to  reprint  at  his  own  charges 
just  those  two  chapters,  to  distribute  to  all 
true  lovers  in  the  kingdom.  It  would  be 
hard  to  say  how  often  he  and  his  maid 
had  read  them  aloud  together,  with  amorous 
punctuation — caresses  for  commas,  and  kisses 
for  full-stops. 

'Morris'  Sigurd  the  Volsung,  12/-,  less  dis., 

9/-' 

This  book  they  loved  when  their  love  had 
grown  to  have  more  of  earnest  purpose  in 
it,  and  its  first  hysteric  ecstasy  had  passed 
into  the  more  solemn  ardours  of  the  love 
that  goes  not  with  spring,  but  loves  even 
unto  the  winter  and  beyond.  It  is  marked 
all  through  in  pencil  by  Narcissus  ;  but  on 
one  page,  where  it  opens  easily,  there  are 
written  initials,  in  a  woman's  hand,  against 
this  great  passage  : — 

'She  said:   "Thou  shalt  never  unsay  it,  and  thy  heart 

is  mine  indeed  : 
Thou  shalt  bear  thy  love  in  thy  bosom  as  thou  helpest 

the  earth -folk's  need  : 
Thou  shalt  wake  to  it  dawning  by  dawning ;  thou  shalt 

sleep  and  it  shall  not  be  strange  : 
There  is  none  shall  thrust  between  us  till  our  earthly 

lives  shall  change. 


OF    NARCISSUS  131 

Ah,  my  love  shall  fare  as  a  banner  in  the  hand  of  thy 

renown, 
In  the  arms  of  thy  fame  accomplished  shall  it  lie  when 

we  lay  us  adown. 
O  deathless  fame  of  Sigurd  !     O  glory  of  my  lord  ! 
O    birth    of    the    happy    Brynhild    to    the    measureless 

reward  ! " 
So  they  sat  as  the  day  grew  dimmer,  and  they  looked 

on  days  to  come, 
And  the  fair  tale  speeding  onward,  and  the  glories  of 

their  home ; 
And  they  saw  their  crowned  children  and  the  kindred 

of  the  kings, 
And  deeds  in  the  world  arising  and  the  day  of  better 

things : 
All  the  earthly  exaltation,  till  their  pomp  of  life  should 

be  passed, 
And  soft   on  the   bosom  of  God  their  love  should  be 

laid  at  the  last.' 

And  on  the  page  facing  this  lies  a  pressed 
flower — there  used  to  be  two — guarded  by 
these  tender  rhymes  : — 

'  Whoe'er  shall  read  this  mighty  song 
In  some  forthcoming  evensong. 
We  pray  thee  guard  these  simple  flowers, 
For,  gentle  Reader,  they  are  "ours."' 

But  ill  has  some  '  gentle  Reader '  attended 
to  the  behest,  for,  as  I  said,  but  one  of  the 
flowers  remains.  One  is  lost — and  Narcissus 
has  gone  away.  This  inscription  is  but 
one  of  many  such  scattered  here  and  there 


132         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

through  his  books,  for  he  had  a  great  facility 
in  such  minor  graces,  as  he  had  a  neat  hand 
at  tying  a  bow.  I  don't  think  he  ever  sent 
a  box  of  flowers  without  his  fertility  serving 
him  with  some  rose-leaf  fancy  to  accompany 
them  ;  and  on  birthdays  and  all  red-letter 
days  he  was  always  to  be  counted  upon  for 
an  appropriate  rhyme.  If  his  art  served 
no  other  purpose,  his  friend  would  be  grate- 
ful to  him  for  that  alone,  for  many  great 
days  would  have  gone  without  their  '  white 
stone'  but  for  him  ;  when,  for  instance, 
J.  A.  W.  took  that  brave  plunge  of  his, 
which  has  since  so  abundantly  justified  him 
and  more  than  fulfilled  prophecy  ;  or  when 
Samuel  Dale  took  that  bolder,  namely  a 
wife,  he  being  a  philosopher — incidents, 
Reader,  on  which  I  long  so  to  digress,  and 
for  which,  if  you  could  only  know  before- 
hand, you  would,  I  am  sure,  give  me  freest 
hand.  But  beautiful  stories  both,  I  may 
not  tell  of  you  here ;  though  if  the  Reader 
and  I  ever  spend  together  those  hinted 
nights  at  the  *  Mermaid,'  I  then  may. 

But   to   return.     I    said    above   that   if  I 
were  to  enumerate  all  the  books,  so  to  say, 


OF    NARCISSUS  133 

*  implicated '  in  the  love  of  Narcissus  and 
his  Thirteenth  Maid,  I  should  have  to  cata- 
logue quite  a  small  librar>^  I  forgot  for  the 
moment  what  literal  truth  I  was  writing, 
for  it  was  indeed  in  quite  a  large  library 
that  they  first  met.  In  '  our  town '  there 
is,  Reader,  an  old-world  institution,  which, 
I  think,  you  would  well  like  transported  to 
yours,  a  quaint  subscription  library  '  estab- 
lished' ever  so  long  ago,  full  of  wonderful 
nooks  and  corners,  where  (of  course,  if  you 
are  a  member)  one  is  sure  almost  at  any 
time  of  the  day  of  a  solitary  corner  for  a 
dream.  It  is  a  sweet  provision,  too,  that 
it  is  managed  by  ladies,  whom  you  may, 
if  you  can,  image  to  yourself  as  the  Hes- 
perides  ;  for  there  are  three  of  them  ;  and 
may  not  the  innumerable  galleries  and  spiral 
staircases,  serried  with  countless  shelves, 
clustered  thick  with  tome  on  tome,  figure 
the  great  tree,  with  its  many  branches  and 
its  wonderful  gold  fruit — the  tree  of  know- 
ledge? The  absence  of  the  dragon  from 
the  similitude  is  as  well,  don't  you  think  ? 

Books,   of  all   things,   should   be   tended 
by  reverent  hands  ;   and,  to  my  mind,  the 


134  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

perfunctory  in  things  ecclesiastical  is  hardly 
more  distressing  than  the  service  of  books  as 
conducted  in  many  great  libraries.  One 
feels  that  the  librarii  should  be  a  sacred 
order,  nearly  allied  to  the  monastic,  refined 
by  varying  steps  of  initiation,  and  certainly 
celibates.  They  should  give  out  their  books 
as  the  priest  his  sacrament,  should  wear 
sacred  vestments,  and  bear  about  with  them 
the  priestlike  aura,  as  of  divine  incarnations 
of  the  great  spirit  of  Truth  and  Art  in  whose 
temples  they  are  ministrants.  The  next 
step  to  this  ideal  ministry  is  to  have  our 
books  given  out  to  us  by  women.  Though 
they  may  understand  them  not,  they  handle 
them  with  gentle  courtesy,  and  are  certainly 
in  every  way  to  be  preferred  to  the  youthful 
freckled  monster  with  red  spines  upon  his 
head,  and  nailed  boots,  'the  work  of  the 
Cyclops,'  upon  his  feet,  whose  physiognomy 
is  contorted  by  cinnamon-balls  at  the  very 
moment  he  carries  in  his  arms  some  great 
Golden-lips  or  gentle  Silver-tongue.  What 
good  sweet  women  there  are,  too,  who  would 
bless  heaven  for  the  occupation  ! 

Well,   as    I    said,   we   in   that   particular 


OF    NARCISSUS  135 

library  are  more  fortunate,  and  two  of  the 
'subscribers,'  at  least,  did  at  one  time  ex- 
press their  appreciation  of  its  privileges  by  a 
daily  dream  among  its  shelves.  One  day — 
had  Hercules  been  there  overnight  ? — we 
missed  one  of  our  fair  attendants.  Was  it 
Aegle,  Arethusa,  or  Hesperia?  Narcissus 
probably  knew.  And  on  the  next  she  was 
still  missing ;  nor  on  the  third  had  she 
returned ;  but  lo !  there  was  another  in  her 
stead — and  on  her  Narcissus  bent  his  gaze, 
according  to  v/ont.  A  little  maid,  with 
noticeable  eyes,  and  the  hair  Rossetti  loved 
to  paint — called  Hesper,  'by  many,'  said 
Narcissus,  one  day  long  after,  solemnly 
quoting  the  Vita  Nuova,  '  who  know  not 
wherefore.' 

'Why!  do  you  know?'  I  asked. 

'  Yes  ! '  And  then,  for  the  first  time,  he 
had  told  me  the  story  I  have  now  to  tell 
again.  He  had,  meanwhile,  rather  surprised 
me  by  little  touches  of  intimate  observation 
of  her  which  he  occasionally  let  slip — as,  for 
instance,  '  Have  you  noticed  her  forehead  ? 
It  has  a  fine  distinction  of  form  ;  is  pure 
ivory,  surely ;   and  you  should  watch  how 


136         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

deliciously  her  hair  springs  out  of  it,  like 
Httle  wavy  threads  of  "  old  gold  "  set  in  the 
ivory  by  some  cunning  artist.' 

I  had  just  looked  at  him  and  wondered  a 
moment.  But  such  attentive  regard  was 
hardly  matter  for  surprise  in  his  case  ;  and, 
moreover,  I  always  tried  to  avoid  the  subject 
of  women  with  him,  for  it  was  the  one 
on  which  alone  there  was  danger  of  our 
disagreeing.  It  was  the  only  one  in  which 
he  seemed  to  show  signs  of  cruelty  in  his 
disposition,  though  it  was,  I  well  know,  but 
a  thoughtless  cruelty ;  and  in  my  heart  I 
always  felt  that  he  was  too  right-minded 
and  noble  in  the  other  great  matters  of 
life  not  to  come  right  on  that  too  when 
'  the  hour  had  struck.'  Meanwhile,  he  had 
a  way  of  classifying  amours  by  the  number 
of  verses  inspired — as,  '  Heigho  !  it 's  all 
over ;  but  never  mind,  I  got  two  sonnets  out 
of  her' — which  seemed  to  me  an  exhibition 
of  the  worst  side  of  his  artist  disposition, 
and  which — well,  Reader,  jarred  much  on 
one  who  already  knew  what  a  true  love 
meant.  It  was,  however,  I  could  see,  quite 
unconscious  :    and   I   tried  hard  not   to   be 


OF    NARCISSUS  137 

intolerant  towards  him,  because  fortune  had 
blessed  me  with  an  earlier  illumination. 

Pray,  go  not  away  with  the  misconception 
that  Narcissus  was  ever  base  to  a  woman. 
No  !  he  left  that  to  Circe's  hogs,  and  the  one 
temptation  he  ever  had  towards  it  he  turned 
into  a  shining  salvation.  No !  he  had 
nothing  worse  than  the  sins  of  the  young 
egoist  to  answer  for,  though  he  afterwards 
came  to  feel  those  pitiful  and  mean  enough. 

Another  noticeable  feature  of  Hesper's 
face  was  an  ever-present  sadness — not  as  of 
a  dull  grief,  but  as  of  some  shining  sorrow, 
a  quality  which  gave  her  face  much  arresting 
interest.  It  seemed  one  great,  rich  tear. 
One  loved  to  dwell  upon  it  as  upon  those 
intense  stretches  of  evening  sky  when  the 
day  yearns  through  half-shut  eyelids  in  the 
west.  One  continually  wondered  what  story 
it  meant,  for  some  it  must  mean. 

Watching  her  thus  quietly,  day  by  day, 
it  seemed  to  me  that  as  the  weeks  from  her 
first  coming  went  by,  this  sadness  deepened  ; 
and  I  could  not  forbear  one  day  questioning 
the  elder  Hesperides  about  her,  thus  bring- 
ing upon    myself  a   revelation    I   had  little 


138         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

expected.  For,  said  she,  '  she  was  glad  I 
had  spoken  to  her,  for  she  had  long  wished 
to  ask  me  to  use  my  influence  with  my 
friend,  that  he  might  cease  paying  Hesper 
attentions  which  he  could  not  mean  in 
earnest,  but  which  she  knew  were  already 
causing  Hesper  to  be  fond  of  him.  Having 
become  friendly  with  her,  she  had  found  out 
her  secret  and  remonstrated  with  her,  with 
the  result  that  she  had  avoided  Narcissus 
for  some  time,  but  not  without  much  misery 
to  herself,  over  which  she  was  continually 
brooding.' 

All  this  was  an  utter  surprise,  and  a  sad- 
dening one ;  for  I  had  grown  to  feel  much 
interest  in  the  girl,  and  had  been  especially 
pleased  by  all  absence  of  the  flighty  ten- 
dencies with  which  too  many  girls  in  public 
service  tempt  men  to  their  own  destruction. 
She  had  seemed  to  me  to  bear  herself  with 
a  maidenly  self-respect  that  spoke  of  no 
little  grace  of  breeding.  She  had  two  very 
strong  claims  on  one's  regard.  She  was 
evidently  a  woman,  in  the  deep,  tragic  sense 
of  that  word,  and  a  lady  in  the  only  true 
sense  of  that.     The  thought  of  a  life  so  rich 


OF   NARCISSUS  139 

in  womanly  promise  becoming  but  another 

of  the  idle  playthings  of  Narcissus  filled  me 
with  something  akin  to  rage,  and  I  was  not 
long  in  saying  some  strong  words  to  him. 
Not  that  I  feared  for  her  the  coarse  '  ruin  ' 
the   world    alone    thinks    of.       Is   that    the 
worst  that  can  befall  woman  ?     What  of  the 
spiritual  deflowering,  of  which  the  bodily  is 
but  a  symbol  ?     If  the  first  fine  bloom  of 
the  soul  has  gone,  if  the  dream  that  is  only 
dreamed  once  has  grown  up  in  the  imagina- 
tion and  been  once  given,  the  mere  chastity 
of    the   body   is    a    lie,   and    whatever    its 
fecundity,  the  soul  has  nought  but  sterility 
to  give  to  another.     It  is  not  those  kisses  of 
the   lips — kisses   that   one    forgets    as    one 
forgets  the  roses  we  smelt  last  year — which 
profane  ;    they   but   soil   the   vessel^  of  the 
sacrament,   and    it   is   the    sacrament    itself 
which  those  consuming  spirit-kisses,  which 
burn  but  through  the  eyes,  may  desecrate. 
It  is  strange  that  man  should  have  so  long 
taken  the  precisely  opposite  attitude  in  this 
matter,  caring  only  for  the  observation  of 
the  vessel,  and  apparently  dreaming  not  of 
any  other  possible  approach  to  the  sanctities. 


140         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

Probably,  however,  his  care  has  not  been  of 
sanctities  at  all.  Indeed,  most  have,  doubt- 
less, little  suspicion  of  the  existence  of 
such,  and  the  symbol  has  been  and  is  but  a 
selfish  superstition  amongst  them — woman,  a 
symbol  whose  meaning  is  forgotten,  but  still 
the  object  of  an  ignorant  veneration,  not 
unrelated  to  the  preservation  of  game. 

Narcissus  took  my  remonstrance  a  little 
flippantly,  I  thought,  evidently  feeling  that 
too  much  had  been  made  out  of  very  little ; 
for  he  averred  that  his  '  attentions '  to  Hesper 
had  been  of  the  slightest  character,  hardly 
more  than  occasional  looks  and  whispers, 
which,  from  her  cold  reception  of  them,  he 
had  felt  were  more  distasteful  to  her  than 
otherwise.  He  had  indeed,  he  said,  ceased 
even  these  the  last  few  days,  as  her  reserve 
always  made  him  feel  foolish,  as  a  man 
fondling  a  fair  face  in  his  dream  wakes  on  a 
sudden  to  find  that  he  is  but  grimacing  at 
the  air.  This  reassured  me,  and  I  felt  little 
further  anxiety.  However,  this  security  only 
proved  how  little  I  really  understood  the 
weak  side  of  my  friend.  I  had  not  realised 
how  much  he  really  was  Narcissus,  and  how 


OF    NARCISSUS  141 

dear  to  him  was  a  new  mirror.  My  speaking 
to  him  was  the  one  wrong  course  possible  to 
be  taken.  Instead  of  confirming  his  growing 
intention  of  indifference,  it  had,  as  might 
have  been  foreseen,  the  directly  opposite 
effect ;  and  from  the  moment  of  his  learning 
that  Hesper  secretly  loved  him,  she  at  once 
became  invested  with  a  new  glamour,  and 
grew  daily  more  and  more  the  forbidden 
fascination  few  can  resist. 

I  did  not  learn  this  for  many  months. 
Meanwhile  Narcissus  chose  to  deceive  me 
for  the  first  and  only  time.  At  last  he  told 
me  all ;  and  how  different  was  his  manner 
of  telling  it  from  his  former  gay  relations 
of  conquest.  One  needed  not  to  hear  the 
words  to  see  he  was  unveiling  a  sacred 
thing,  a  holiness  so  white  and  hidden,  the 
most  reverent  word  seemed  a  profanation  ; 
and,  as  he  laboured  for  the  least  soiled 
wherein  to  enfold  the  revelation,  his  soul 
seemed  as  a  maid  torn  with  the  blushing 
tremors  of  a  new  knowledge.  Men  only 
speak  so  after  great  and  wonderful  travail, 
and  by  that  token  I  knew  Narcissus  loved  at 
last.     It  had  seemed  unlikely  ground  from 


142  THE    BOOK-BILLS 

which  love  had  first  sprung  forth,  that  of  a 
self-worship  that  could  forgo  no  slightest 
indulgence — but  thence  indeed  it  had  come. 
The  silent  service  my  words  had  given  him 
to  know  that  Hesper's  heart  was  offering 
to  him  was  not  enough ;  he  must  hear  it 
articulate,  his  nostrils  craved  an  actual 
incense.  To  gain  this  he  must  deceive  two 
— his  friend,  and  her  whose  poor  face  would 
kindle  with  hectic  hope,  at  the  false  words 
he  must  say  for  the  true  words  he  must  hear. 
It  was  pitifully  mean  ;  but  whom  has  not 
his  own  hidden  lust  made  to  crawl  like  a 
thief,  afraid  of  a  shadow,  in  his  own  house  ? 
Narcissus'  young  lust  was  himself,  and  Moloch 
knew  no  more  ruthless  hunger  than  burns  in 
such.  Of  course,  it  did  not  present  itself 
quite  nakedly  to  him  ;  he  persuaded  himself 
there  could  be  little  harm — he  meant  none. 

And  so,  instead  of  avoiding  Hesper,  he 
sought  her  the  more  persistently,  and  by 
some  means  so  far  wooed  her  from  her 
reticence  as  to  win  her  consent  to  a  walk 
together  one  autumn  afternoon.  How  little 
do  we  know  the  measure  of  our  own  pro- 
posing !    That  walk  was  to  be  the  most  fate- 


OF    NARCISSUS  143 

ful  his  feet  had  ever  trodden  through  field 
and  wood,  yet  it  seemed  the  most  accidental 
of  gallantries.  A  little  town-maid,  with  a 
romantic  passion  for  '  us ' ;  it  would  be  in- 
teresting to  watch  the  child  ;  it  would  be 
like  giving  her  a  day's  holiday,  so  much 
sunshine  'in  our  presence.'  And  so  on. 
But  what  an  entirely  different  complexion 
was  the  whole  thing  beginning  to  take 
before  they  had  walked  a  mile.  Behind  the 
flippancy  one  had  gone  to  meet  were  surely 
the  growing  features  of  a  solemnity.  Why, 
the  child  was  a  woman  indeed  ;  she  could 
talk,  she  had  brains,  ideas — and,  Lord  bless 
us,  Theories  !  She  had  that '  excellent  thing 
in  woman,'  not  only  a  voice,  which  she  had, 
too,  but  character.  Narcissus  began  to  loose 
his  regal  robes,  and  from  being  merely 
courteously  to  be  genuinely  interested.  Why, 
she  was  a  discovery !  As  they  walked  on, 
her  genuine  delight  in  the  autumnal  nature, 
the  real  imaginative  appeal  it  had  for  her, 
was  another  surprise.  She  had,  evidently, 
a  deep  poetry  in  her  disposition,  rarest  of  all 
female  endowments.  In  a  surprisingly  few 
minutes  from  the  beginning  of  their  walk  he 


144         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

found  himself  taking  that  '  little  child '  with 
extreme  seriousness,  and  wondering  many 
'  whethers.' 

They  walked  out  again,  and  yet  again, 
and  Narcissus'  first  impressions  deepened. 
He  had  his  theories,  too  ;  and,  surely,  here 
was  the  woman  !  He  was  not  in  love — at 
least,  not  with  her,  but  with  her  fitness  for 
his  theory. 

They  sat  by  a  solitary  woodside,  beneath 
a  great  elm  tree.  The  hour  was  full  of 
magic,  for  though  the  sun  had  set,  the  smile 
of  her  day's  joy  with  him  had  not  yet  faded 
from  the  face  of  earth.  It  was  the  hour 
vulgarised  in  drawing-room  ballads  as  the 
'gloaming.'  They  sat  very  near  to  each 
other ;  he  held  her  hand,  toying  with  it ; 
and  now  and  again  their  eyes  met  with  the 
look  that  flutters  before  flight,  that  says, 
'  Dare  I  give  thee  all  ?  Dare  I  throw  my 
eyes  on  thine  as  I  would  throw  myself  on 
thee  ? '  And  then,  at  last,  came  the  inevit- 
able moment  when  the  eyes  of  each  seem  to 
cry  '  O  yes ! '  to  the  other,  and  thd  gates  fly 
back  ;  all  the  hidden  light  springs  forth,  the 
woods  swim  round,  and  the  lips  meet  with 


OF    NARCISSUS  145 

a  strange  shock,  while  the  eyes  of  the  spirit 
close  in  a  lapping  dream  of  great  peace. 

If  you  are  not  ready  to  play  the  man, 
beware  of  a  kiss  such  as  the  lips  of  little 
Hesper,  that  never  knew  to  kiss  before, 
pressed  upon  the  mouth  of  Narcissus.  It 
sent  a  chill  shudder  through  him,  though  it 
was  so  sweet,  for  he  could  feel  her  whole  life 
surging  behind  it ;  and  was  the  kiss  he  had 
given  her  for  it  such  a  kiss  as  that  ?  But 
he  had  spoken  much  to  her  of  his  ideas  of 
marriage ;  she  knew  he  was  sworn  for  ever 
against  that  She  must  know  the  kiss  had 
no  such  meaning ;  for,  besides,  did  she  not 
scorn  the  soiled  '  tie '  also  ?  Were  not  their 
theories  at  one  in  that  ?  He  would  be  doing 
her  no  wrong ;  it  was  her  own  desire.  Yet 
his  kiss  did  mean  more  than  he  could  have 
imagined  it  meaning  a  week  before.  She 
had  grown  to  be  genuinely  desirable.  If  love 
tarried,  passion  was  awake — that  dangerous 
passion,  too,  to  which  the  intellect  has  added 
its  intoxication,  and  that  is,  so  to  say, 
legitimised  by  an  '  idea.' 

Her  woman's  intuition  read  the  silence 
and  answered  to  his  thought.  '  Have  no 
K 


146         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

fear,'  she  said,  with  the  deep  deliberation  of 
passion  ;  '  I  love  you  with  my  whole  life,  but 
I  shall  never  burden  you,  Narcissus.  Love 
me  as  long  as  you  can,  I  shall  be  content ; 
and  when  the  end  comes,  though  another 
woman  takes  you,  I  shall  not  hinder.' 

O  great  girl-soul!  What  a  poltroon, 
indeed,  was  Narcissus  beside  you  at  that 
moment.  You  ready  to  stake  your  life  on 
the  throw,  he  temporising  and  bargaining  as 
over  the  terms  of  a  lease.  Surely,  if  he 
could  for  one  moment  have  seen  himself  in 
the  light  of  your  greatness,  he  had  been 
crushed  beneath  the  misery  of  his  own 
meanness.  But  as  yet  he  had  no  such 
vision  ;  his  one  thought  was,  '  She  will  do 
it !  will  she  draw  back  ? '  and  the  feeble 
warnings  he  was  obliged  to  utter  to  keep 
his  own  terms,  by  assuring  his  conscience  of 
'her  free-will,'  were  they  not  half- fearfully 
whispered,  and  with  an  inward  haste,  lest 
they  should  give  her  pause  ?  *  But  the 
world,  my  dear  —  think  ! '  'It  will  have 
cruel  names  for  thee.'  '  It  will  make  thee 
outcast — think  ! ' 

'  I  know  all,'  she  had  answered  ;   '  but  I 


OF   NARCISSUS  147 

love  you,  and  two  years  of  your  love  would 
pay  for  all.  There  is  no  world  for  me  but 
you.  Till  to-night  I  have  never  lived  at  all, 
and  when  you  go  I  shall  be  as  dead.  The 
world  cannot  hurt  such  a  one.' 

Ah  me,  it  was  a  wild,  sweet  dream  for 
both  of  them,  one  the  woman's,  one  the 
poet's,  of  a  'sweet  impossible'  taking  flesh  ! 
For,  do  not  let  us  blame  Narcissus  over- 
much. He  was  utterly  sincere  ;  he  meant  no 
wrong.  He  but  dreamed  of  following  a 
creed  to  which  his  reason  had  long  given  a 
hopeless  assent.  In  a  more  kindly-organised 
community  he  might  have  followed  it,  and 
all  have  been  well ;  but  the  world  has  to  be 
dealt  with  as  one  finds  it,  and  we  must  get 
sad  answers  to  many  a  fair  calculation  if  we 
'state'  it  wrongly  in  the  equation.  That 
there  is  one  law  for  the  male  and  another 
for  the  female  had  not  as  yet  vitally  entered 
into  his  considerations.  He  was  too  dizzy 
with  the  dream,  or  he  must  have  seen  what 
an  unequal  bargain  he  was  about  to  drive. 

At  last  he  did  awake,  and  saw  it  all ;  and 
in  a  burning  shame  went  to  Hesper,  and 
told  her  that  it  must  not  be. 


148         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

Her  answer  was  unconsciously  the  most 
subtly  dangerous  she  could  have  chosen  : 
*  If  I  like  to  give  myself  to  you,  why  should 
you  not  take  me  ?  It  is  of  my  own  free-will. 
My  eyes  are  open.'  It  was  his  very  thought 
put  into  words,  and  by  her.  For  a  moment 
he  wavered — who  could  blame  him  ?  *  Am 
I  my  brother's  keeper?' 

*  Yes  !  a  thousand  times  yes  ! '  cried  his 
soul ;  for  he  was  awake  now,  and  he  had 
come  to  see  the  dream  as  it  was,  and  to 
shudder  at  himself  as  he  had  well-nigh  been, 
just  as  one  shudders  at  the  thought  of  a 
precipice  barely  escaped.  In  that  moment, 
too,  the  idea  of  her  love  in  all  its  divineness 
burst  upon  him.  Here  was  a  heart  capable 
of  a  great  tragic  love  like  the  loves  of  old  he 
read  of  and  whimpered  for  in  sonnets,  and 
what  had  he  offered  in  exchange  ?  A  poor, 
philosophical  compromise,  compounded  of 
pessimism  and  desire,  in  which  a  man  should 
have  all  to  gain  and  nothing  to  lose,  for 

'  The  light,  light  love  he  has  wings  to  fly 
At  suspicion  of  a  bond.' 

'  I  would  I  did  love  her,'  his  heart  was  crying 
as  he  went  away.     '  Could  I  love  her  ? '  was 


OF    NARCISSUS  149 

his  next  thought.  'Do  I  love  her?' — but 
that  is  a  question  that  always  needs  longer 
than  one  day  to  answer. 

Already  he  was  as  much  in  love  with  her 
as  most  men  when  they  take  unto  themselves 
wives.  She  was  desirable — he  had  pleasure 
in  her  presence.  He  had  that  half  of  love 
which  commonly  passes  for  all — the  passion; 
but  he  lacked  the  additional  incentives  which 
nerve  the  common  man  to  face  that  fear 
which  seems  well-nigh  as  universal  as  the 
fear  of  death,  I  mean  the  fear  of  marriage — 
life's  two  fears :  that  is,  he  had  no  desire  to 
increase  his  worldly  possessions  by  annexing 
a  dowry,  or  ambition  of  settling  down  and 
procuring  a  wife  as  part  of  his  establishment. 
After  all,  how  full  of  bachelors  the  world 
would  be  if  it  were  not  for  these  motives  : 
for  the  one  other  motive  to  a  true  marriage, 
the  other  half  of  love,  however  one  names  it, 
is  it  not  a  four-leaved  clover  indeed  ?  Nar- 
cissus was  happily  poor  enough  to  be  above 
those  motives,  even  had  Hesper  been  any- 
thing but  poor  too  ;  and  if  he  was  to  marry 
her,  it  would  be  because  he  was  capable  of 
loving  her  with  that  perfect  love  which,  of 


ISO         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

course,  has  alone  right  to  the  sacred  name, 
that  which  cannot  take  all  and  give  nought, 
but  which  rather  holds  as  watchword  that  to 
love  is  better  than  to  be  loved. 

Who  shall  hope  to  express  the  mystery  ? 
Yet,  is  not  thus  much  true,  that,  if  it  must 
be  allowed  to  the  cynic  that  love  rises  in  self, 
it  yet  has  its  zenith  and  setting  in  another — 
in  woman  as  in  man  ?  Two  meet,  and 
passion,  the  joy  of  the  selfish  part  of  each,  is 
born  ;  shall  love  follow  depends  on  whether 
they  have  a  particular  grace  of  nature,  love 
being  the  thanksgiving  of  the  unselfish  part 
for  the  boon  granted  to  the  other.  The 
common  nature  snatches  the  joy  and  for- 
gets the  giver,  but  the  finer  never  forgets, 
and  deems  life  but  a  poor  service  for  a  gift 
so  rare ;  and,  though  passion  be  long  since 
passed,  love  keeps  holy  an  eternal  memory. 

'  Love  took  up  the  harp  of  life  and  smote  on  all  the  chords 
with  might  ; 
Smote  the  chord  of  self,  that,  trembling,  pass'd  in  music 
out  of  sight.' 

Since  the  time  of  fairy-tales  Love  has  had 
a  way  of  coming  in  the  disguise  of  Duty. 
What  is  the  story  of  Beauty  and  the  Beast 


OF    NARCISSUS  151 

but  an  allegory  of  true  love  ?  We  take  this 
maid  to  be  our  wedded  wife,  for  her  sake  it 
perhaps  seems  at  the  time.  She  is  sweet 
and  beautiful  and  to  be  desired  ;  but,  all  the 
same,  we  had  rather  shake  the  loose  leg  of 
bachelordom,  if  it  might  be.  However  it  be, 
so  we  take  her,  or  maybe  it  is  she  takes  us, 
with  a  feeling  of  martyrdom  ;  but  lo !  when 
we  are  home  together,  what  wonderful  new 
lights  are  these  beginning  to  ray  about  her, 
as  though  she  had  up  till  now  kept  a  star 
hidden  in  her  bosom.  What  is  this  new 
morning  strength  and  peace  in  our  life? 
Why,  we  thought  it  was  but  Thestylis,  and 
lo  !  it  is  Diana  after  all.  For  the  Thirteenth 
Maid  or  the  Thirteenth  Man,  both  alike, 
rarely  come  as  we  had  expected.  There 
seems  no  fitness  in  their  arrival.  It  seems 
so  ridiculously  accidental,  as  I  suppose  the 
hour  of  death,  whenever  it  comes,  will  seem. 
One  had  expected  some  high  calm  prelude 
of  preparation,  ending  in  a  festival  of  choice, 
like  an  Indian  prince's,  when  the  maids  of 
the  land  pass  before  him  and  he  makes 
deliberate  selection  of  the  fateful  She.  But, 
instead,  we  are  hurrying  among  our  day's 


152         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

business,  maybe,  our  last  thought  of  her  ; 
we  turn  a  corner,  and  suddenly  she  is  before 
us.  Or  perhaps,  as  it  fell  with  Narcissus, 
we  have  tried  many  loves  that  proved  but 
passions ;  we  have  just  buried  the  last,  and 
are  mournfully  leaving  its  grave,  determined 
to  seek  no  further,  to  abjure  bright  eyes,  at 
least  for  a  long  while,  when  lo !  on  a  sudden 
a  little  maid  is  in  our  path  holding  out  some 
sweet  modest  flowers.  The  maid  has  a 
sweet  mouth,  too,  and,  the  old  Adam  being 
stronger  than  our  infant  resolution,  we  smell 
the  flowers  and  kiss  the  mouth — to  find 
arms  that  somehow,  we  know  not  why,  are 
clinging  as  for  life  about  us.  Let  us  beware 
how  we  shake  them  off,  for  thus  it  is  decreed 
shall  a  man  meet  her  to  have  missed  whom 
were  to  have  missed  all.  Youth,  like  that 
faithless  generation  in  the  Scriptures,  always 
craveth  after  a  sign,  but  rarely  shall  one  be 
given.  It  can  only  be  known  whether  a 
man  be  worthy  of  Love  by  the  way  in  which 
he  looks  upon  Duty.  Rachel  often  comes 
in  the  grey  cloak  of  Leah.  It  rests  with  the 
man's  heart  whether  he  shall  know  her 
beneath  the  disguise ;  no  other  divining-rod 


OF    NARCISSUS  153 

shall  aid  him.  If  it  be  as  Bassanio's,  brave 
to  'give  and  hazard  all  he  hath,'  let  him  not 
fear  to  pass  the  seeming  gold,  the  seeming 
silver,  to  choose  the  seeming  lead.  '  Why, 
that's  the  lady,'  thou  poor  magnificent 
Morocco.  Nor  shall  the  gold  fail,  for  her 
heart  is  that,  and  for  silver  thou  shalt  have 
those  'silent  silver  lights  undreamed  of  of 
face  and  soul. 

These  are  but  scattered  hints  of  the  story 
of  Narcissus'  love  as  he  told  it  me  at  last, 
in  broken,  struggling  words,  but  with  a  light 
in  his  face  one  power  alone  could  set  there. 

When  he  came  to  the  end,  and  to  all  that 
little  Hesper  had  proved  to  him,  all  the 
strength  and  illumination  she  had  brought 
him,  he  fairly  broke  down  and  sobbed,  as 
one  may  in  a  brother's  arms.  For,  of  course, 
he  had  come  out  of  the  ordeal  a  man  ;  and 
Hesper  had  consented  to  be  his  wife.  Often 
she  had  dreamed  as  he  had  passed  her  by 
with  such  heedless  air:  'If  I  love  him  so, 
can  it  be  that  my  love  shall  have  no  power 
to  make  him  mine,  somehow,  some  day? 
Can  I  call  to  him  so  within  my  soul  and  he 
not  hear?     Can  I  wait  and  he  not  come?' 


154         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

And  her  love  had  been  strong,  strong  as  a 
destiny ;  her  voice  had  reached  him,  for  it 
was  the  voice  of  God. 

When  I  next  saw  her,  what  a  strange 
brightness  shone  in  her  face,  what  a  new 
beauty  was  there !  Ah,  Love,  the  great 
transfigurer !  And  why,  too,  was  it  that  his 
friends  began  to  be  dissatisfied  with  their 
old  photographs  of  Narcissus,  though  they 
had  been  taken  but  six  months  before  ? 
There  seemed  something  lacking  in  the 
photograph,  they  said.  Yes,  there  was  ;  but 
the  face  had  lacked  it  too.  What  was  the 
new  thing — '  grip  '  was  it,  joy,  peace  ?  Yes, 
all  three,  but  more  besides,  and  Narcissus 
had  but  one  name  for  all.     It  was  Hesper. 

Strange,  too,  that  in  spite  of  promises  we 
never  received  a  new  one.  Narcissus,  who 
used  to  be  so  punctual  with  such  a  request. 
Perhaps  it  was  because  he  had  broken  his 
looking-glass. 


OF    NARCISSUS  155 


CHAPTER    X 

'IN  VISHNU-LAND  WHAT  AVATAR?' 

'  If  I  love  you  for  a  year  I  shall  love  you  for 
ever,'  Narcissus  had  said  to  his  Thirteenth 
Maid.  He  did  love  her  so  long,  and  yet 
he  has  gone  away.  Do  you  remember  your 
Les  Miserables,  that  early  chapter  where 
Valjean  robs  the  child  of  his  florin  so  soon 
after  that  great  illuminating  change  of  heart 
and  mind  had  come  to  him?  Well,  still 
more  important,  do  you  remember  the  clue 
Hugo  gives  us  to  aberration  ?  There  is 
comfort  and  strength  for  so  many  a  heart- 
breaking failure  there.  It  was  the  old 
impetus,  we  are  told,  that  was  as  yet  too 
strong  for  the  new  control ;  the  old  instinct, 
too  dark  for  the  new  light  in  the  brain.  It 
takes  every  vessel  some  time  to  answer  to 


156         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

its  helm ;  with  us,  human  vessels,  years, 
maybe.  Have  you  never  suddenly  become 
sensitive  of  a  gracious  touch  in  the  air,  and 
pondered  it,  to  recognise  that  in  some  half- 
unconscious  act  you  had  that  moment  been 
answering  for  the  first  time  the  helm  of  an 
almost  forgotten  resolution  ?  Ah  me,  blessed 
is  it  to  see  the  prow  strongly  sweeping  up 
against  the  sky  at  last ! 

'  Send  not  a  poet  to  London,'  said  Heine, 
and  it  was  a  true  word.  At  least,  send  him 
not  till  his  thews  are  laced  and  his  bones  set. 
He  may  miss  somewhat,  of  course  ;  there  is 
no  gain  without  a  loss.  He  may  be  in 
ignorance  of  the  last  nuance,  and  if  he 
deserves  fame  he  must  gain  it  unaided  of 
the  vulgar  notoriety  which,  if  he  have  a 
friend  or  two  in  the  new  journalism,  they 
will  be  so  eager  to  bestow  ;  but  he  will  have 
kept  his  soul  intact,  which,  after  all,  is  the 
main  matter.  It  is  sweet,  doubtless,  to  be 
one  of  those  same  mushroom-men,  sweet  to 
be  placarded  as  'the  new'  this  or  that,  to 
step  for  a  day  into  the  triumphal  car  of 
newspaper  renown,  drawn  by  teams  of  willing 


OF    NARCISSUS  157 

paragraph-men — who,  does  it  never  strike 
you  ?  are  but  doing  it  all  for  hire,  and 
earning  their  bread  by  their  bent  necks. 
Yet  for  those  to  whom  it  is  denied  there  is 
solid  comfort ;  for  it  is  not  fame,  and,  worse 
still,  it  is  not  life,  'tis  but  to  be  *  a  Bourbon  in 
a  crown  of  straws.' 

If  one  could  only  take  poor  foolish 
Cockneydom  right  away  outside  this  poor 
vainglorious  city,  and  show  them  how  the 
stars  are  smiling  to  themselves  above  it, 
nudging  each  other,  so  to  say,  at  the  silly 
lights  that  ape  their  shining — for  such  a  little 
while ! 

Yes,  that  is  one  danger  of  the  poet  in 
London,  that  he  should  come  to  think  him- 
self'somebody ' ;  though,  doubtless,  in  pro- 
portion as  he  is  a  poet,  the  other  danger  will 
be  the  greater,  that  he  should  deem  himself 
'nobody.'  Modest  by  nature,  credulous  of 
appearances,  the  noisy  pretensions  of  the 
hundred  and  one  small  celebrities,  and  the 
din  of  their  retainers  this  side  and  that,  in 
comparison  with  his  own  unattended  course, 
what  wonder  if  his  heart  sinks  and  he  gives 


158         THE    BOOK-BILLS 

up  the  game ;  how  shall  his  little  pipe, 
though  it  be  of  silver,  hope  to  be  heard 
in  this  land  of  bassoons  ?  To  take  London 
seriously  is  death  both  to  man  and  artist. 
Narcissus  had  sufficient  success  there  to 
make  this  a  temptation,  and  he  fell.  He 
lost  his  hold  of  the  great  things  of  life, 
he  forgot  the  stars,  he  forgot  his  love,  and 
what  wonder  that  his  art  sickened  also.  For 
a  few  months  life  was  but  a  feverish  clutch 
after  varied  sensation,  especially  the  dear 
tickle  of  applause  ;  he  caught  the  facile 
atheistic  flippancy  of  that  poor  creature,  the 
'  modern  young  man,'  all-knowing  and  all- 
foolish,  and  he  came  very  near  losing  his 
soul  in  the  nightmare.  But  he  had  too  much 
ballast  in  him  to  go  quite  under,  and  at  last 
strength  came,  and  he  shook  the  weakness 
from  him.  Yet  the  fall  had  been  too  far  and 
too  cruel  for  him  to  be  happy  again  soon. 
He  had  gone  forth  so  confident  in  his  new 
strength  of  manly  love ;  and  to  fall  so,  and 
almost  without  an  effort !  Who  has  not 
called  upon  the  mountains  to  cover  him  in 
such  an  hour  of  awakening,  and  who  will 


OF    NARCISSUS  159 

wonder  that  Narcissus  dared  not  look  upon 
the  face  of  Hesper  till  solitude  had  washed 
him  clean,  and  bathed  him  in  its  healing 
oil  ?  I  alone  bade  him  good-bye.  It  was  in 
this  room  wherein  I  am  writing,  the  study 
we  had  taken  together,  where  still  his  books 
look  down  at  me  from  the  shelves,  and  all 
the  memorials  of  his  young  life  remain.  O 
can  it  have  been  but  'a  phantom  of  false 
morning'?  A  Milton  snatched  up  at  the 
last  moment  was  the  one  book  he  took  with 
him. 

From  that  night  until  this  he  has  made 
but  one  sign — a  little  note  which  Hesper  has 
shown  me,  a  sob  and  a  cry  to  which  even  a 
love  that  had  been  more  deeply  wronged 
could  never  have  turned  a  deaf  ear.  Surely 
not  Hesper,  for  she  has  long  forgiven  him, 
knowing  his  weakness  for  what  it  was.  She 
and  I  sometimes  sit  here  together  in  the 
evenings  and  talk  of  him  ;  and  every  echo 
in  the  corridor  sets  us  listening,  for  he  may 
be  at  the  other  side  of  the  world,  or  but  the 
other  side  of  the  street — we  know  so  little  of 
his  fate.     Where  he  is  we  know  not ;  but  if 


i6o   BOOK-BILLS  OF  NARCISSUS 

he  still  lives,  what  he  is  we  have  the  assurance 
of  faith.  This  time  he  has  not  failed,  we 
know.     But  why  delay  so  long? 

November  1889 — May  1890. 
November  1894. 


THE  END 


Printed  by  T.  and  A.  Constabi  E,  Printers  to  Her  Majesty 
at  the  Edinburgh  University  Press 


List   of   Books 


in 


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Mr.  QuiLLER  Couch  In  Speaker. 

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Keynotes.     Sixth  Edition.     Crown  8vo.     3s.  6d.  net. 

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1895- 

List  of  Books 

IN 

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Published  by  John   Lane 

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ADAMS  (FRANCIS). 

Essays  in  Modernity.    Crown  8vo.    5s.  net.     [Shortly. 
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(See  Keynotes  Series.)  [/«  rapid  preparation. 

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BEARDSLEY  (AUBREY). 

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forth  an  exact  account  of  the  Manner  of  State  held  by 
Madam  Venus,  Goddess  and  Meretrix,  under  the 
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DAVIDSON  (JOHN). 

Plays  :  An  Unhistorical  Pastoral ;  A  Romantic  Farce ; 
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Scaramouch  in  Naxos,  a  Pantomime,  with  a  Frontis- 
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DAVIDSON  (JOHN). 

Fleet  Street  Eclogues.  Second  Edition.  Fcap.  8vo, 
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DAVIDSON  (JOHN). 

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JOHN  LANE  7 

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The  First  Step-.    A    Dramatic   Moment.     Small  4to. 
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White  Wampum  :  Poems.     Crown  8vo.     5s.  net. 

[/«  preparation. 
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Ballads  of  Boy  and  Beak.     Fcap.  8vo.     2s.  6d.  net. 

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Beardsley.     Crown  8vo,  cloth.     3s.  6d.  net. 
Vol.       I.  Keynotes.     By  George  Egerton. 

[Sixth  edition  now  ready. 
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Vol.     III.  Poor   Folk.      Translated  from  the  Russian  of 
F.  Dostoievsky  by  Lena  Milman.     With 
a  Preface  by  George  Moore. 
Vol.     IV.  A  Child  OF  the  Age.    By  Francis  Adams. 


JOHN  LANE  9 

KEYNOTES  SERIES— coniiuued. 

Vol.       V,  The  Great    God   Pan   and  The  Inmost 

Light.     By  Arthur  Machen. 
Vol.     VI.  Discords.     By  George  Egerton. 

The  following  Volumes  are  in  rapid  preparation. 
Vol.    VII.  Prince  Zaleski.     By  M.  P.  Shiel. 
Vol.  VIII.  The  Woman  who  Did.     By  Grant  Allen. 
Vol.     IX.  Women's  Tragedies.     By  H.  D.  Lovvry. 
Vol.       X.  The  Bohemian  Girl  and  Other  Stories. 

By  Henry  Harland. 
Vol.     XI.  A  Volume  of  Stories.    By  H.  B.  Marriott 

Watson. 
Vol.   XII.  A  Volume  of  Stories.     By  Ella  D'Arcy. 
Boston :  Roberts  Bros. 

LEATHER  (R.  K.). 

Verses.     250  copies.     Fcap.  8vo.     3s.  net. 

Transferred  by  the  Author  to  the  present  Publisher. 

LE  GALLIENNE  (RICHARD). 

Prose    Fancies.       With    Portrait    of    the    Author   by 
Wilson  Steer.    Third  Edition.    Crown  8vo.    Purple 
cloth,  uniform  with  'The  Religion  of  a  Literary  Man.' 
5s.  net. 
Also  a  limited  large  paper  edition.     12s.  6d.  net. 
New  York  :  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons. 

LE  GALLIENNE  (RICHARD). 

The  Book  Bills  of  Narcissus.  An  Account  rendered 
by  Richard  le  Gallienne.  Third  Edition. 
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uniform  with  'The  Religion  of  a  Literary  Man.' 
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LE  GALLIENNE  (RICHARD). 

English   Poems.     Third  Edition.     Crown  8vo.     Purple 
cloth,  uniform  with  'The  Religion  of  a  Literary  Man.' 
5s.  net. 
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LE  GALLIENNE  (RICHARD). 

George  Meredith:  Some  Characteristics.  With  a  Biblio- 
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Fourth  Edition.  Crown  8vo.  Purple  cloth,  uniform 
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LE  GALLIENNE  (RICHARD). 

The  Religion  of  a  Literary  Man.      5th  thousand. 
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LOWRY  (H.   D.). 

Women's  Tragedies.     Crown  8vo.     3s.  6d.  net. 

(See  Keynotes  Series.)  [/«  preparation. 

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LUCAS  (WINIFRED). 

A  Volume  of  Poems.     Fcap.  8vo.     4s.  6d.  net. 

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MARZIALS  (THEO.). 

The  Gallery  of  Pigeons  and  Other  Poems.  Post 
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Transferred  by  the  Author  to  the  present  Publisher. 

MEREDITH  (GEORGE). 

The  First  Published  Portrait  of  this  Author, 
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MEYNELL  (MRS.),  (ALICE  C.  THOMPSON). 

Poems.  Second  Edition.  Fcap.  8vo.  3s.  6d.  net.  A 
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MEYNELL  (MRS.). 

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The  Building  of  the  City  Beautiful.     Fcap  8vo. 
"With  a  Decorated  Cover.     5s.  net. 
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MILMAN  (LENA). 

Poor  Folk.     Translated  from  the  Russian  of  F.  Dos- 
toievsky.    Crown  8vo.     3s.  6d.  net. 
{See  Keynotes  Series.) 
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MONKHOUSE  (ALLAN). 

Books  and  Plays  :  A  Volume  of  Essays  on  Meredith, 
Borrow,  Ibsen,  and  others.    400  copies.    Crown  8vo. 
5s.  net. 
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NESBIT  (E.). 

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O'SHAUGHNESSY  (ARTHUR). 

His  Life  and  His  Work.     With  Selections  from  his 
Poems.      By  Louise  Chandler  Moulton.      Por- 
trait and  Cover  Design.     Fcap.  Svo.     5s.  net. 
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OXFORD  CHARACTERS. 

A  series  of  lithographed  portraits  by  Will  Rothenstein, 
with  text  by  F.  York  Powell  and  others.  To  be 
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PETERS  (WM.  THEODORE). 

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PLARR  (VICTOR). 

A  Volume  of  Poems.     Crown  8vo.     5s.  net. 

[  In  preparation . 

RICKETTS  (C.  S.)AND  C.   H.  SHANNON. 

Hero  and  Leander.  By  Christopher  Marlowe 
and  George  Chapman.  With  Borders,  Initials,  and 
Illustrations  designed  and  engraved  on  the  wood  by 
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English  vellum  and  gold.  200  copies  only.  35s.  net. 
Boston  :  Copeland  &  Day. 

RHYS  (ERNEST). 

A  London  Rose  and  Other  Rhymes.    With  Title-page 
designed  by  Selwyn  Image.      350  copies.     Crown 
8vo.     5s.  net. 
New  York  :  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co. 

SHIEL  (M,  P.). 

Prince  Zaleski.     Crown  8vo.     3s.  6d.  net. 

{See  Keynotes  Series.)  [In  preparation. 

Boston  :  Roberts  Bros. 

STREET  (G.  S.). 

The  Autobiography  of  a  Boy.  Passages  selected  by 
his  friend  G.  S.  S.  With  Title-page  designed  by 
C.  W.  Furse.     Fcap.  8vo.     3s.  6d.  net. 

[Fourth  Edition  now  ready. 
Philadelphia  :  J.  B.  Lippincott  Co. 


JOHN  LANE 


SYMONS  (ARTHUR). 

A  New  Volume  of  Poems.     Crown  8vo.    55.  net. 

[Ill  preparation. 

THOMPSON  (FRANCIS). 

Poems.     With  Frontispiece,  Title-page,  and  Cover  Design 
by  Laurence  Housman.      Fourth  Edition.      Pott 
4to.    5s.  net. 
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TREE  (H.  BEERBOHM). 

The  Imaginative  Faculty  :  A  Lecture  dehvered  at  the 
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an  unpublished  drawing  by  the  Marchioness  of  Granby. 
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TYNAN  HINKSON  (KATHARINE). 

Cuckoo  Songs.     With  Title-page  and  Cover  Design  by 
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Boston  :  Copeland  &  Day. 

TYNAN  HINKSON  (KATHARINE). 

Miracle  Plays.  [In  preparation. 

WATSON  (H.  B.  MARRIOTT). 

A  Volume  of  Stories.     Crown  8vo.     3s.  6d.  net. 
(See  Keynotes  Series.)  [In preparation . 

Boston  :  Roberts  Bros. 

WATSON  (WILLIAM). 

Odes  and  Other  Poems.    Second  Edition.    Fcap.  8vo, 
buckram.    4s.  6d.  net. 
New  York  :  Macmillan  &  Co, 

WATSON  (WILLIAM). 

The   Eloping  Angels  :   A  Caprice.     Second    Edition. 
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THE  PUBLICATIONS  OF 


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Excursions  in  Criticism  :  being  some  Prose  Recrea- 
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New  York  :  Macmillan  &  Co. 


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The  Prince's  Quest  and  Other  Poems.  With  a 
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WATTS  (THEODORE). 

Poems.     Crown  8vo.     5s.  net.  \In preparation. 

There  -Mill  also  be  an  Edition  de  Luxe  of  this  volume  printed  at 
ike  Kelmscott  Press. 

WHARTON  (H.  T.). 

Sappho.  Memoir,  Text,  Selected  Renderings,  and  a 
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The  incomparable  and  ingenious  history  of  Mr.  W.  H., 
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Vol.     I.  Lady  Windermere's    Fan  :  A    Comedy   in 

Four  Acts.  [Oiti  of  print. 

Vol.    II.  A  Woman  of  No   Importance  :  A  Comedy 

in  Four  Acts.  [Jzis I  published. 

Vol.  in.  The    Duchess  of    Padua  :  A   Blank  Verse 

Tragedy  in  Five  Acts.  [  Very  shortly. 
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THE    YELLOW    BOOK 

An  Illustrated  Quarterly 

Vol.  I.  Fourth  Edition,  272  pages,  15  Illustrations,  Title-page, 
and  a  Cover  Design.      Cloth.     Price  <)S.  net.     Pott  /^to. 

The  Literary  Contributions  by  Max  Beerbohm,  A.  C.  Benson, 
Hubert  Crackanthorpe,  Ella  D'Arcy,  John  David- 
son, George  Egerton,  Richard  Garnett,  Edmund 
GossE,  Henry  Harland,  John  Oliver  Hobbes,  Henry 
James,  Richard  le  Gallienne,  George  Moore, 
George  Saintsbury,  Fred.  M.  Simpson,  Arthur 
Symons,  William  Watson,  Arthur  Waugh. 

The  Art  Contributions  by  Sir  Frederic  Leighton,  /*.  R.A., 
Aubrey  Beardsley,  R.  Anning  Bell,  Charles  W. 
Furse,  Laurence  Housman,  J.  T.  Nettleship,  Joseph 
Pennell,  Will  Rothenstein,  Walter  Sickert. 


i6  THE  PUBLICATIONS  OF  JOHN  LANE 

Vol.  II.     Third  Edition.    Pott  i^to,  ■^b/^  pages,  23  Illustrations, 

and  a  Neiv  Title-page  and  Cover  Design.    Cloth.    Price  55.  net. 

The  Literary  Contributions  by  Frederick  Greenwood, 
Ella  D'Arcy,  Charles  Willeby,  John  Davidson, 
Henry  Harland,  Dollie  Radford,  Charlotte  M. 
Mew,  Austin  Dobson,  V.,  O.,  C.  S.,  Katharine  de 
Mattos,  Philip  Gilbert  Hamerton,  Ronald  Camp- 
bell Macfie,  Dauphin  Meunier,  Kenneth  Grahame, 
Norman  Gale,  Netta  Syrett,  Hubert  Crackan- 
thorpe,  Alfred  Hayes,  Max  Beerbohm,  William 
Watson,  and  Henry  James. 

The  Art  Contributions  by  Walter  Crane,  A.  S.  Hartrick, 
Aubrey  Beardsley,  Alfred  Thornton,  P.  Wilson 
Steer,  John  S.  Sargent,  A.R.A.,  Sydney  Adamson, 
Walter  Sickert,  W.  Brown  MacDougal,  E.  J. 
Sullivan,  Francis  Forster,  Bernhard  Sickert, 
and  Aymer  Vallance. 
A  Special  Feature   of  Volume  11.    is  a  frank  criticism  of 

the   Literature  and  Art  of  Volume  i.   by  Philip   Gilbert 

Hamerton. 

Vol.  III.     Now  Ready.     Pott  ^to,  280  pages,  15  Illustrations, 

and  a  New  Title-page  and  Cover  Design.    Cloth.    Price  ^s.  net. 

The  Literary  Contributions  by  William  Watson,  Kenneth 
Grahame,  Arthur  Symons,  Ella  D'Arcy,  Jose  Maria 
de  Heredia,  Ellen  M.  Clerke,  Henry  Harland, 
Theo  Marzials,  Ernest  Dowson,  Theodore  Wratis- 
law,  Arthur  Moore,  Olive  Custance,  Lionel  John- 
son, Annie  Macdonell,  C.  S.,  Nora  Hopper,  S. 
Cornish  Watkins,  Hubert  Crackanthorpe,  Morton 
Fullerton,  Leila  Macdonald,  C.  W.  Dalmon,  Max 
Beerbohm,  and  John  Davidson. 

The  Art  Contributions  by  Philip  Broughton,  George 
Thomson,  Aubrey  Beardsley,  Albert  Foschter, 
Walter  Sickert,  P.  Wilson  Steer,  William  Hyde, 
and  Max  Beerbohm. 

Prospectuses  Post  Free  on  Application. 
LONDON  :    JOHN  LANE 
BOSTON  :     COPELAND  &  DAY 


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